![jessie j flashlight smule sing jessie j flashlight smule sing](https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article5784915.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/Jessie-J-and-Tommy-Bleasby.jpg)
“Apple Music or Spotify is a different animal to us, because they’re distributing artist recordings, they’re dealing with the labels, they’re licensing the master recordings. Part of our philosophy is that not everyone has a degree in music, not everyone studies it, but music is intrinsic to who we are,” says Smith.
![jessie j flashlight smule sing jessie j flashlight smule sing](https://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-000123789621-q6gsbc-t500x500.jpg)
It’s not a karaoke company per se: we’re building a network around music and performance. “We’re a social network that’s as much about creation as consumption. When an artist does take part in a campaign, as Jessie J, The Wombats and Cody Simpson have done to name but three, the deal will usually be brokered with their management and involve them performing a live version of a song for fans to sing and/or play along with. Smule’s apps – Sing! but also Guitar!, Magic Piano, AutoRap and Ocarina – use compositions rather than master recordings, so its licensing relationships are with publishers not labels. This, admittedly, comes from the head of a company that does not depend on those labels for licensing deals. “And from a distribution standpoint, if you look at the companies competing to be number one in streaming – Spotify, Deezer, Apple, Google, Amazon – none of those is a label, right? We once said the music industry was the labels, but it’s really not. Certainly from a marketing standpoint because artist management has taken that over.” “I’ve got nothing against the labels: I think they’ve played an important role, but I think they’re increasingly less relevant. It’s not a silly question: in May, British singer Tom Bleasby claimed to be fielding calls from labels after his virtual duet with Jessie J using Smule’s Sing! Karaoke app went viral on Facebook and YouTube.īut back to Smith. Jeff Smith, chief executive of music apps developer Smule, is mulling a question from Music Ally about the role its 25m-strong community can play in discovering new singers, and whether the next logical step for those people will be label deals.
![jessie j flashlight smule sing jessie j flashlight smule sing](https://c-fa.cdn.smule.com/rs-ssg6/sing_google/performance/cover/65/61/1e3ee356-49c3-4b9f-89fb-6c13bbc478f9.jpg)
“How important is a record deal now? Bieber was one of the first discovered through social media, then he went off and signed the record deals and the rest, but I wonder how important those deals are now, and in the future?” Tags: Apps Jeannie Yang Jeff Smith Jessie J Publishing Smule Songwriters subscriptions