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Universal's Audible Watermark (2012)
- cudder 5y agoSeems down, here's a mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20220419110330/https://www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermark https://web.archive.org/web/20220419110330/https://www.mattm...
- steve_taylor 5y agoThat page links to the live test, which is getting hugged to death.
- nowahe 5y agoWorking mirror : https://web.archive.org/web/20220419110330/https://www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermark https://web.archive.org/web/20220419110330/https://www.mattm...
- cudder 5y agoThanks, changed it to hopefully ease the load.
- hopfenspergerj 5y agoI remember finding this article several years ago when the watermark was really quite obvious and offensive. Especially obvious in piano music, since the tone of a piano doesn’t naturally waiver. Since then, they’ve either dialed it back or removed it, because I don’t experience this anymore.
- cpcallen 5y agoYes: I was unwilling to subscribe to Google Play Music (as then was) because something like half of their classical music collection—including all of Deutsche Grammophon— was unlistenable due to watermarking. It was so bad that I actually reported it internally as bug against the GPM player before I learned that it was a watermark thanks to Matt's article. Much griping about it persuaded someone on the GPM team to get fresh, supposedly-fixed recordings from UMG but to no avail: the new audio seemed to be as bad as the old. That was a few years ago, and I lost track of what happened after that but evidently UMG actually fixed the problem at some point because YT Music seems fine now, and I no longer notice the problem on other streaming services that were also formerly affected by it.
- alternatetwo 5y agoI don't have a source, but IIRC they removed watermarked files from streaming services, i.e. Deezer, entirely.
- causality0 5y agoI feel bad for the artists and engineers who work so hard only to get their track modified like this. It's like a gallery stamping a barcode onto the middle of a painting. I do wonder where else these show up. Does Audible put them in audiobooks for example?
- capableweb 5y ago> I feel bad for the artists and engineers who work so hard only to get their track modified like this. It's like a gallery stamping a barcode onto the middle of a painting. Don't use Universal as a publisher then. At a certain point, its up to the artists to ensure they publish their music as they want, and any artifacts of making the wrong choice is ultimately them making the wrong choice.
- boomlinde 5y agoYou have to be much more wary: don't sign with a label that at some point in the future gets bought by a label that gets bought by Universal
- daniel-cussen 5y agoYeah it's wrong to pretend there's that much choice. And these shills always want the choice to be individual--hey if you don't the water label, don't use Universal. And in fact every label has something about it like this, like if you don't like getting the cover art discounted from your CD, don't use Warner Bros, if you don't like x, don't use y. But what they hate is when it's collective, like we got together with 1000 other artists and all of us are negotiating collectively to get the watermark removed. Because that actually has an impact.
- tokai 5y agoWhy would anyone with artistic integrity sign with any label nowadays? Everyone can distribute. If people like your stuff you can make a label yourself eventually.
- gizajob 5y agoMajor labels not only compromising fidelity with lossy compression, but also adding distortion along the way. Tut tut. Would be appalled if this was my music.
- drexlspivey 5y agoAs a commenter from 2012 mentions, the original quality recordings are now only available to pirates. Way to go.
- notimetorelax 5y agoWe all knew that DRM in software generally makes it worse, now we have the same in audio.
- ishitatsuyuki 5y agoThis should be (2013).
- japanuspus 5y agoThe submitter likely stumbled over the site after reading the discussion on `oggify` earlier today, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31080518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31080518 (I know I did).
- jbj 5y ago2012-01-10 with updates in 2013 and 2015
- deanc 5y agoI can't hear it. I have Sony-1000XM4 headphones, in a silent room.
- probably_wrong 5y agoMe neither, but I partially blame the choice of song - not only am I not familiar with it, but the fact that it's an electric guitar means that I cannot differentiate where the guitar's own distortion ends and the watermark begins. (Sennheiser wired headphones listening on my Android phone, in case it matters)
- JohnBooty 5y agoWhat sort of connection are you using? Wireless, I assume? Which codec? I wonder if your headphones are connected to your source device via a particularly lossy BT codec... (I know they're wireless headphones; but some wireless headphones such as previous Sonys have optional wired connections) The effect is really obvious to me in wired headphones, and my ears are pretty much trash. I struggle mightily to tell the difference between FLAC and good mp3/AAC encodes and struggle to understand people in real life sometimes. The Universal watermark is really egregious to me, particularly in the last few seconds of that "Three Doors Down" clip. It's kind of a fluttering sound in the guitars themselves, not a noise laid over the top. Not shaming anybody if they can't hear it. Like I said, my hearing is pretty bad and I have other physical disabilities.
- dfxm12 5y agoI can hear a difference between the two clips on my laptop speakers with ambient background noise. I couldn't tell you which one is original vs watermarked, but then again, I'm not really familiar with the song to begin with.
- camgunz 5y agoIt's most discernible on sustains. On the original they're "smooth". On the watermarked they sound "sparkly" or "fluttery".
- bentcorner 5y ago
- adamgordonbell 5y agoArchive: https://web.archive.org/web/20210515132130/https://www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermark https://web.archive.org/web/20210515132130/https://www.mattm... Website is down at this time for me, but web archive works. There is a listening test up here that trains you to hear it. I couldn't hear it at first. http://mattmontag.com/audio-listening-test/ http://mattmontag.com/audio-listening-test/
- DrBazza 5y agoThat reminds me of this monstrosity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia It largely stopped me knowingly buying anything associated with Sony.
- dTal 5y ago"Verance claims on their website that, while the watermark is able to survive recording through microphones (such as recording a film in a movie theater with a camcorder), as well as compression and encoding, it is imperceptible to human hearing, and the presence of the watermark does not affect audio quality" Of course, they always claim that. Never mind that it's theoretically impossible. Such marketing should earn a fraud prosecution.
- DrBazza 5y agoI can't recall if it was ever cracked - I think it has been, but largely Verance's claims at the time were true - people tried to record movie audio separate to the video and remix them to remove the signal, but that failed. As it says, it's just an (audio) steganography system, presumably at a slow and variable bit rate so it's hard to detect without knowing the algorithm.
- kayson 5y agoAround the same time as this article, I remember participating in a double blind study that was trying to evaluate something similar for movies. They wanted to test how audible it was to "discerning" listeners, so they contacted local community orchestras, and I ended up in a little theater for a couple of hours with a handful of musicians watching and listening to movie clips over and over. The "control" was just plain old mp3 compression artifacts, which seems to match the effects observed in the case of the music watermark. In my case, there were definitely a few instances where things sounded a little off in some of the clips, but most of the time they sounded totally normal. It really made you wonder if you were just hearing things. I always wondered how accurate I was but they wouldn't share the results!
- dTal 5y ago>I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with watermarking. The problem is with this particular poorly tested implementation. There is. Audio watermarking is inherently audible, because that is the only way to avoid being stripped out (deliberately or inadvertently) by the incredible technology we have for removing inaudible information from audio recordings: lossy audio codecs. The artifacts must be so salient that the codecs deem them important, audible information - codecs designed with elaborate psychoacoustic models, especially to make that judgement call with maximum efficacy. There's no way out.
- mixedCase 5y agoI imagine this could be worked around by using forked encoders that are designed to introduce the watermark when encoding lossy versions. This of course would mean the watermark would not survive transcoding from lossless, but as we can see in TFA the watermark can be made useless all the same without such efforts. With that said the oxygen malpractitioners that run the music industry have never put actual consumers' satisfaction above implementing trivially circumvented security theater, so pirates win all the same in all scenarios.
- adrianN 5y agoIf the listener doesn't know the "true" information, it is sufficient if the watermarked version sounds plausibly like a real sound. I think it's too strong to require the watermark to be completely inaudible. It is sufficient if given two recordings of unknown sounds a listener can't tell which one is watermarked and which one isn't.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- boredumb 5y agoDAMN SON, WHERE'D YOU FIND THIS? D-D-D-D-D-DJ XYZ EXCLUSIVE. Jokes aside, watermarks are generally a detriment to what ever medium they're applied to, but as someone who doesn't have a bunch of audio/visual IP I'm much less invested in them outside of being a consumer so I have no idea what the trade off an artist is willing to make in order to balance the IP preservation vs artistic preservation. It feels like a personal question, but once you move your IP over to universal or any other publisher, in my mind you've given up a bit of that creative control in exchange of the publishers services.
- thih9 5y agoSince this is from 2012, does anyone know what is the state as of today?
- montag 5y agoThe Universal watermarks story is mostly in the past. The Spotify catalog has been cleaned up to the point where I rarely come across it. Here's a playlist I used to share at Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3ZbRKMGb8nqXqZziwtC5ZY https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3ZbRKMGb8nqXqZziwtC5ZY Seems they've all been cleaned up except for the Elton John track.
- londons_explore 5y agoNow that such a watermarking scheme is published, it seems easy to make a watermark unreadable... Simply detect each 1 and 0 through the increases and decreases in power every 0.08 seconds, and then reverse a random 50% of them. Surely a watermark shouldn't be removable? Yet this seems trivially removable.
- DrBoring 5y agoTangential I've imagined some sort of video watermark that would be dynamically injected into video streams from services like Netflix. The watermark would ID the account to which the stream was sent. The purpose would be to catch whoever is making the web-rips the make it into the wild. I don't actually expect anything like this to be practical. It's a lot of technology to develop and support just for the slight chance of catching video pirates. But it's a fun mental exercise. Questions I ask myself include: 1. What would the watermark look like visually? I image a slightly off-colored pixel appearing at various x,y locations at various time intervals. Sort of like the yellow microdots on laser printers that ID an individual printer. 2. How would the visual data be injected into the existing cached video byte chunks residing on CDN (I'm not sure of the correct technical term for the packets). I suppose the altered packets would have to be created on the fly and sent to the CDN host serving the individual streamer.
- zuminator 5y agoWatermarking the streams doesn't do anything to prevent Blu-ray rips from being propagated, just as watermarking streaming audio doesn't prevent someone from sharing their CD rips. All it takes is one pristine source rip for the watermarking effort to be moot. As far as catching web rip culprits, that becomes a cat and mouse game when easily available stolen credit card numbers are a thing. In the end, i think these type of schemes end up protecting information security division income more than they protect the artists' income.
- wildzzz 5y agoSince the only way to watch most streaming services is through their dedicated player that can already overlay text and graphics, why not just take advantage of that? It would need to be something that can survive video transcoding. Something like very slight dimming and brightening of specific segments of the video could encode an ID. The video would already have a list of random segments identified for encoding and each bit in the ID would tell the player to dim or brighten that segment. If you based the segments off of keyframes, the dimming or brightening might be imperceptible.