@bfk, we’ve talked with Auto and Relic in the past about doing an official IDMf Beat Battle comp or release of some sort (before the great fall). The main points that we need to meet before such a thing are:
- Quality
We need to get tracks that are of satisfactory quality for the netlabel’s standards. I’m not terribly concerned about this, as I feel we have some great talent in the BB crew. However, the nature of the Beat Battles, namely a loose, informal, raw and dirty kind of competition, means sometimes the tracks are put together quickly, without lots of mixing and such, which is resolved by allowing artists to polish up their tracks before sending them off to be mastered.
The problem we had tho was that on many tracks the artists no longer had the project files, and weren’t able to polish it up, even just a copy of the master wav.
I think this is easily solved with a disclaimer in the Beat Battle description (which we need to devise a boilerplate description for, but that’s another topic) for participants to hold onto their session files and samples in the event their track is selected for release, so they can go back and clean it up a bit and prepare it for an official submission.
- Track archival/availability
Old winning tracks disappeared off the internet. We wanted to do a best of reaching as far back as the first Beat Battle (of the Beat Battles v2.0, but that’s more a historical note), but many tracks were missing, winning tracks and others.
This is easily solved as you mentioned, archiving winning tracks. I certainly could add them to the BB archive as we move along, and other people who’d like to archive them as well, the more the better. Redundancy is key, especially in the digital domain.
- Finally, and probably the biggest thing, Sample Clearance
Before the forum went down, we had talked a lot about this, as this is probably the biggest obstacle. We need samples that are free to use. It’s fun and all taking a popular track and completely chopping it up into something completely different, but we need to protect the label by finding a legitimate and on-board way of finding and distributing samples.
Officially, samples provided in the Beat Battles must be free of copyright and free to use, however, there is little to no process for actually quality checking this. I think finding a way to either build a sample library from member generated samples, or licensing sample libraries for use would be good options here. Obviously, IDMf has very little budget. I wouldn’t expect them to foot the bill for a community project, so we’d have to find a way of either financing it or getting around the finance issue. Again, this must be in a legitimate manner. Doing it in one of these ways, however, would help guarantee the copyright status of the samples. Furthermore, I had an idea on sample submissions that I’ll go into in the Beat Battle Discussion thread.
Aside from this, we’d need some sort of quality checking on samples before making them available.
These are the hurdles we need to get over for a release, and I want to see it happen!
Also, @bfk, I’ve been following the Beat Battles for some time and am dedicated to pushing them forward, feel free to DM me if you want to bounce ideas about this release, as I’d definitely like to see it happen.
Problem with covers is they take time. The label in the past was bogged down by so much nitty gritty it was literally paralyzed. I watched it wither and die over a period of about two years. Again, check previous releases and the associated dates.
