In the larger of the rooms in Audiomack headquarters, screens outnumber people four or five to one, and, projected on the wall, the site’s healthy live traffic jumps up and down. With the concentrating white guys in T-shirts, it could be any web startup, except for the recording booth. Founded four years ago with four employees and $4000, Audiomack has a lot of stakeholders for a small company. First among them are artists, whose uploaded songs are the site’s content. “Labels now require you to have an audience before they sign you,” says Audiomack’s David Ponte, who came up with the idea for the site with his friend, co-founder, and fellow rap head for life Dave Macli. “They want to make an educated decision. It’s a Moneyball strategy.” For artists looking to draw listeners by any means available, Audiomack is an opportunity to prove their future potential and a bridge to intermediary goals like verified social media accounts and write-ups in magazines like this one.



As much as the music industry complains about infringements on their market, sites like Audiomack serve a useful function for labels. It’s similar to the way LinkedIn works for white-collar offices: if applicants have done a lot of the hard work already, employers can sift and compare. It’s the basis for that Moneyball strategy, and you can only play Moneyball if there’s a large pool of readily available hires. A centralized site of up-and-coming artists is a boon for listeners who like searching out music before it searches them out, but also for labels looking to rationalize their investments in new artists. Seen another way, Audiomack is like hip-hop’s college basketball, where unsigned rappers and producers can put together a highlight reel, build a following, and publicize themselves for the draft. Without the NCAA, NBA teams would have to invest a lot more money developing players. It’s a good tradeoff.



Audiomack’s focus on discovering new music is a natural fit for industry insiders, the way professional scouts are the best audience for high school ball. “Sometimes I just go on the homepage and let it play,” says Rahim Wright, head of marketing for the 740Project at Atlantic Records. “If an artist makes that list, it definitely says something. There are regional influencers, say, in Atlanta, who use Audiomack too, so I’ll check out their pages and make sure I haven’t missed anything.” And when the labels want a new song to get heard, they get them uploaded (themselves or through proxies) to Audiomack, in addition to larger sites like SoundCloud and YouTube. What looks from the outside like the copyright wild west is actually a little more organized. “We usually know when a leak is authorized,” Ponte said. “They’ll use radio DJs or bloggers, but we have a pretty good idea what’s going on.”

Labels have a lot to gain from sites like Audiomack, but they also do have something to lose. Since any users can upload songs, it’s impossible to sort out the legitimate from the illegitimate, and Audiomack doesn’t use an automated system like SoundCloud’s (which they say are unreliable) to identify and exclude copywritten tracks. Their policy leaves the site open for unlicensed remixes that have long been a genre staple, and leaked songs from signed artists. Leaks can cause significant damage to artists trying to make the jump to label stability, as when over 100 unreleased Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan songs flooded the rap internet all at once in May of this year.

Historically, labels have been quick to invoke the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and go after repeat violators, but Audiomack is trying to find agreeable solutions. “They’re very fast,” Wright said of Audiomack. “If I call them and say, ‘We’re going to have this song on iTunes, so don’t have it available for download,’ they’re on it. If there’s a leak and we want it off the site totally, they’ve got it down in one or two minutes.” This responsiveness makes Audiomack a reliable partner for content owners, but it also earns them implicit permission to keep streaming unlicensed tracks that aren’t worrisome enough for the labels to mention. Being quick to settle conflicts agreeably is a smart survival strategy for a small company, even though it requires a lot of manual work to remove offending songs. While I was writing this article, multiple uploads of Eminem’s new single “Phenomenal” shot up the site’s charts, only to be totally purged when I checked back hours later.

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