I 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.
Yes: 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.
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.
I do wonder where else these show up. Does Audible put them in audiobooks for example?
> 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.
Yeah 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.
Why 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.
"Everyone can distribute" only if they're willing and competent to take on the jobs of marketing and distribution. Having heard much the same argument in relation to writers and self-publishing, it's a complete nonsense. Do you really want your favourite artist to spend 80% (arb. number made up for illustration) of their time doing stuff (marketing, that they are quite likely not much good at) or would you rather see them spend the time on the stuff they are good at -- the art?
There's reasons these publishing/distribution industries exist, and I'd not wish their work on artists. The art is hard enough to do on it's own.
The same thing can be said for the travel agency industry.
The bar for publishing has significantly reduced so really it’s a question of the marketing piece you mentioned. Does an artist really need to sell to a label just to get marketing?
What I'm trying to say (poorly) is this: every hour the artist has to spend on doing marketing (probably not well) is an hour they're NOT spending on their art. Me, I'd prefer to see them arting.
(Not sure I understand your reference to the travel industry so well, but that's just me being dim.)
Exactly! I'm probably commenting more deeply in this thread than is helpful, but my wife is a successful composer and DIY just. doesn't. scale. Even if you're not just coasting on some variation of financial inheritance, you can absolutely hustle - and if you get to a certain level of popularity, before you know it, you're spending most of your week answering emails and phone calls. For my wife, it was the pandemic, of all things, that pulled her out of this problem, because she got a PPP loan from the federal government, which gave her enough margin to finally hire a part-time personal assistant. Which in turn helped her get even more work. It's been real wild to watch.
I still think that if you scramble, you should take on as much work as you (or your group) can handle DIY, so that you have leverage when the publishers and the record labels start paying attention. But if you want to be able to continue to make music after seeing some of that success, you'll start to understand why 'the industry' exists.
Some portion of the marketing work is necessary only because it's a big company that needs to keep going. When your costs are low, you can be more grass- roots about it.
Jack Stratton, founder of one of my favorite bands, Vulfpeck did exactly this. He kept the band completely independent and label-free all the way to their 2019 show where they packed out Madison Square Garden. Pretty impressive! That said, I don't know if most artists have the time/know-how to do all the work required for that.
Only tangentially related, but he's done some clever stunts in the band's history, such as releasing an album called "Sleepify" which was 10 completely silent tracks, and told fans to run the album on loop all night when they sleep to game the Spotify system, and the money made from that was used to put on a free tour.
You can see a label as an organizational unit. In the best of worlds:
As an artist I want to associate with a label because they already have an audience for the kind of music I work on. As a consumer I take note of the label and keep track of their catalog because they somewhat consistently release and promote music I am interested in.
The label owners have a self-interest in promoting their catalog, doing work I personally want to spend as little time as possible on.
My music has only cost me money in aggregate, and I've almost exclusively released music for free, as a hobby outside my day job. Thanks to labels I have reached an audience without doing much else than producing music and suggesting my music to labels. This has gotten me an audience where I might not have found one myself, for example in Russia (because I released an EP with a Russian netlabel in the mid 00s that then caught on because they promoted their catalog by hosting regular parties).
You just have to be very wary, as I suggested, of what labels you sign with and what conditions. This is easy for beginners to overlook.
But by all means, tell me more about why I should spend time "making a label" instead of making music, and explain how running a business around my music will affect my artistic integrity positively.
Or sign with the label and add a change of control clause to the contract? Not saying it's not easier said than done, but there are contractual ways to get out of the situation you describe
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.
Not at all. Galleries don't necessarily own the work they're showing, likely can't legally modify the paintings & that painting is likely 1 of a kind vs a copy meant for a specific application. The musicians/engineers were paid for their work, and, barring some gross legal oversight on Universal's part, everyone involved understands that the audio can be edited when they do this.
This is completely missing the point. If I worked tremendously hard on a piece of time-based art like music or film and someone regardless of legal right, changed the experience of every moment of it, I would be tremendously sad.
If you want to talk about your personal feelings, OK, I can't tell you how you may or may not feel. This was simply not expressed in your original post though, so no, I didn't completely miss the point.
These hypothetical anonymous people, from your first post, are not you, from your second post, and no amount of snarky emojis will change that (and this doesn't even touch on the rest of your first post).
Did I really need to spell out that it's emotionally like a gallery stamping a barcode onto a painting and not legally like a gallery stamping a barcode onto a painting? Very well. It's emotionally like a gallery stamping a barcode onto a painting. Sorry for the miscommunication.
Why assume that all artists are against this? Universal aren't adding watermarks out of pure evil intent and desire to ruin the music industry. They're adding watermarks because they think there is an economic case. It's just as likely that artists see this as a net positive to preserve their piece of the pie.
Major 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.
What 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.
I 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.
Me 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)
I can definitely hear it with headphones, although I'm not sure this sample is the best example because even the "original" clip sounds slightly distorted.
"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.
I 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.
Around 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!
>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.
I 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.
Huh? Couldn't anyone just re-encode the lossy version? Though with some generation loss, since a transparent lossy encoding presumably would also preserve any watermarks.
If 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.
As a musician; no. That is not sufficient. Any audible watermark -- and as the grandparent comment correctly points out, that is any that is going to do its job -- is unacceptable. It is modifying what the artist intended you to hear in a destructive way. It is destroying the original performances. This is a terrible practice.
Are you against all lossy compression methods as well? The watermark can simply be a slight tweak of the compression algorithm that could as well have been done for non-watermarking reasons.
The whole point of lossy compression is that it tries to be inaudible, as a primary concern.
The whole point of audio watermarking is that it survives lossy compression. Inaudibility is merely a secondary concern.
This is an adversarial relationship, and one that the audio watermarking is doomed to lose. By and large, lossy codecs succeed in transparency, and therefore as an inevitable consequence, watermarking fails at it. After decades of development, lossy codecs are just too good - there's nowhere left to hide information.
(It's also worth noting that the consumer benefits from the quality tradeoff that compression makes, in the form of decreased storage and bandwidth. They don't benefit from the audio watermarking at all.)
There are always going to be some subjective decisions in the lossy encoding process. Determining which bits to drop via encoder configurations/customization is far from an exact science. These decisions themselves can act as a watermark.
At sufficiently high bitrates modern lossy codecs are transparent. Even MP3, a dinosaur of a lossy codec is transparent (as in nobody can successfully ABX it) for a lot of music starting somewhere in the neighborhood of 192kbps, and at the 320kbps that commercial stores sell MP3s it is transparent for all physically generated music so far tested (some electronic music with incredibly fast attacks can have audible artifacts).
No, as was already explained upthread, "the watermark is supposed to survive being re-encoded, so it can’t be something just in the compression algorithm". It needs to be something that survives no matter which subjective decisions the lossy encoder makes.
Graphical watermarks also destroy the original image, and I think are much more intrusive than what an audible one would be.
I'm unable to load the article and haven't heard one in real life, but in theory it could be done in a way that is imperceptible to human ears but detectable by a program. E.g. imagine masking specific frequencies within a noisy section of the video.
There should be less destructive ways for studios to do this, but unless it's in the video or audio signal it doesn't stand a chance of working reliably.
If a signal is imperceptible to human ears but detectable by a program, it's a prime candidate for being thrown away by lossy compression to save space. All the low hanging fruit there has long since been grabbed. The whole point of an audio watermark is that it must survive re-encoding, but it's a race that cannot be won.
The difference is that the graphical watermark on e.g. a photograph usually isn't there when you've paid for it. These audio watermarks are very obvious to me and frankly make instruments sounds out of tune -- it's like the beating you can hear when tuning strings. I basically only listen to classical music and will not tolerate this.
Right, but it's a problem with this specific implementation, not something that couldn't be addressed by user friendlier versions.
To be clear, I'm also against any kind of watermark, but I'd rather it be done with an imperceptible (to me) audio signal than with a constant graphical watermark as is usually the case. Actually, graphical watermarks could be smarter and less obtrusive as well.
> The difference is that the graphical watermark on e.g. a photograph usually isn't there when you've paid for it.
The same could be the case for these audio ones. It's user hostile if this is done on already paid content (but again, I can't read the original article to confirm).
You are thinking about blatant watermarks on stock imagery and the like. Movies at the theater[1] and streaming videos[2] absolutely contain subtle visible watermarks even though you are paying to see them, which is directly analogous to having audible watermarks on Spotify. In the case of movie theaters we are somewhat desensitized to them, as old projection technologies used similar flashing dots for other reasons, like a cue to the projectionist to get the next reel ready[3].
Oops, that second link is about another type of watermarking, not the anti-piracy kind. Unfortunately, I won't have time to dig up a more appropriate link today.
All kinds of things between the bits on my harddrive and my brain modify what the artist intended me to hear. Is it also unacceptable to listen to songs on headphones, or in rooms with a different geometry than where the song was recorded?
That bar is far too low - reductio ad absurdem, you could go as far as changing lyrics - or substituting an entirely different song - and if you'd never heard the song before you'd never know the difference.
As for more subtle changes, what constitutes a "plausible sound" in any given context is an AI-complete problem. Sure on a particular song, you might get away with e.g. tinkering with the reverb a bit, or changing the tempo by 0.5% - but how can you possibly do that in the general case?
Remember - all such changes have to be audibly salient to humans, because that's the only thing guaranteed to survive.
The connections made between artist expression and listeners are precious, rare, vital.
You’re saying it’s ok to decimate it - as long it’s replaced with some “plausible” proxy? Plausible decided by who, the artist or business requirements?
The argument is that this exists on a spectrum. The best way to get the artists true intention is to watch a film in a well-calibrated theater. Then a high-quality Blu-ray. Web streaming involves even more compromise.
We tolerate Netflix releasing films in less than 4k. They do that because of a practical business benefit (cost). Similarly, Universal is making a compromise in the artist's vision to meet a business requirement. I think if the compromise is sufficiently small and the business benefit is sufficiently large, it's ok to do this.
As a former orchestra player, and a listener who likes to sit in front of a Hi-Fi system, and listen to music intently, this is not OK.
When you're passive listening, you're only perceiving the "outlines" of the music, but listening actively reveals a lot of details, and this kind of wobbling becomes both more noticeable and disturbing.
When listening the music actively, anyone can distinguish between natural and unnatural sounds, and this will bother many people if they listen more actively.
> 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.
You're assuming that perceptual audio coders do a perfect job at encoding what can be heard* and not encoding what can't be heard*. This isn't true in both directions — they encode detail that can't be heard* in the source, and lose detail that can be heard in the source*.
*This is contextual, depending heavily on the listener and the listening conditions.
Not a perfect job. But a state of the art job! The relationship between watermarkers and lossy perceptual codecs is fundamentally adversarial - one side trying to eliminate all inaudible information, the other trying to sneak inaudible information past it. And so much more research has been poured into lossy compression, that the watermarkers just can't win. Bear in mind also that the watermark needs to work with all lossy codecs, so the information must be considered salient by all of them. There's just no way to do this inaudibly.
I doubt that this is where we are at today. We have higher fidelity transmission compared to a joint-stereo 128kbps mp3, which was probably already enough to carry imperceptible watermarks.
All major market FM broadcasts in the United States have audio watermarking applied to them, and most likely to their online only streams as well. Do you hear the watermarking in that audio?
The system is called CBET and it's based on the psychoacoustic model as well, except it determines the level at which watermark should be injected at. High enough that it passes codecs easily, but just below perception so you generally can't detect the tones that it has added to the audio.
The trade is that CBET only moves about 8 bits/second of information through the side channel, which is just enough to push a station ID and timestamp through the channel for Nielsen's ratings purposes.
FM radio is a dumpster fire anyway, quality-wise. Apart from the awful dynamic range and noise floor, god knows how many plugins and mp3 re-encodes are used in the average pipeline. So I wouldn't be especially surprised to find that 8 bits/second extra crap on the pile goes unnoticed.
However I'm awfully curious about this system, especially "high enough that it passes codecs easily". I would naively expect that to be highly dependent on the codec and bitrate chosen, and further expect the range between "inaudible" and "codec-passing" to be negative for many common untransparent lossy profiles, like 128kbps mp3. Where can I read more?
It's hard to find information on. The company used to be called "Arbitron" and they filed several patents on the technology, which is where I did most of my research.
There are 10 bands, each of which can carry 1 of 18 tones. 16 tones are to signal, so the stream is 4 bits wide, and the other two tones are used as a "STOP" and "SYNC" marker in the data stream.
All bands carry identical information, but each bit within a band is encoded with a different tone than any other band. So, it appears random or uncorrelated at first glance, but you can see the pattern pretty quickly if you do a long enough analysis. The same message gets identically repeated 12 to 13 times per minute and the message only changes once per minute. Here's an example isolation of the signal [1].
The coder monitors incoming audio and does a psychoacoustic pass to determine which level the tones should be injected at. If it can't find a good level for a tone, it uses the lowest possible level... which usually works out fine due to the 10 redundant signals in the watermark.
Encoders like MP3 see the injected tones as signal and will make the bits available to ensure they're encoded rather than correctly masking them out as non-audible material. The 10 bands help here as well, as even if the encoder fails to code the signal in one band, there's usually enough redundant bands that you can successfully decode the watermark.
I disagree. It depends how many bits you want to encode in what period of time. If you only need 1 bit per second, then it can still be inaudible and not susceptible to _current_ lossy psychoacoustic compression models. Universal was both dumb and greedy (and hopeful?) so they got caught making their music into crap.
However, encoding a series of highly discernable tones into the audio is just dumb. Instead they should use phase modulation at low frequencies. Current compression models don't play with subtle changes of meter much, because they mostly use local encoding and there's not much room for improved compression with (non-audible) modulation. Of course, if Universal wanted to be able to accurately detect 5 second clips (rather than 2 minute songs) this would be a lot more difficult... and of course they want every thing, at the expense of listener experience.
There's a large gap between audible and detectable.
A transmitter could transmit a weak signal in a specific pattern on a number of arbitrary preselected frequencies. They would more-or-less seem like noise lost in the noise floor. Only when you specifically filter for the specific set of frequencies can you discern the pattern that was put there that could not appear by chance. You don't even need to use the same frequencies throughout the transmission. As long as the schedule is decided up-front it can serve like a one-time pad for encryption.
I am far from an expert in this, but, couldn't you design a watermark that removes certain frequencies in known locations in the spectrum, at known times? Those gaps would obviously stay missing in a compressed version - lossy codecs don't add noise.
DAMN 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.
The 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
Seems they've all been cleaned up except for the Elton John track.
Now 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.
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.
Watermarking 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.
Since 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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadThat 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.
I do wonder where else these show up. Does Audible put them in audiobooks for example?
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.
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.
There's reasons these publishing/distribution industries exist, and I'd not wish their work on artists. The art is hard enough to do on it's own.
The bar for publishing has significantly reduced so really it’s a question of the marketing piece you mentioned. Does an artist really need to sell to a label just to get marketing?
(Not sure I understand your reference to the travel industry so well, but that's just me being dim.)
I still think that if you scramble, you should take on as much work as you (or your group) can handle DIY, so that you have leverage when the publishers and the record labels start paying attention. But if you want to be able to continue to make music after seeing some of that success, you'll start to understand why 'the industry' exists.
Only tangentially related, but he's done some clever stunts in the band's history, such as releasing an album called "Sleepify" which was 10 completely silent tracks, and told fans to run the album on loop all night when they sleep to game the Spotify system, and the money made from that was used to put on a free tour.
As an artist I want to associate with a label because they already have an audience for the kind of music I work on. As a consumer I take note of the label and keep track of their catalog because they somewhat consistently release and promote music I am interested in.
The label owners have a self-interest in promoting their catalog, doing work I personally want to spend as little time as possible on.
My music has only cost me money in aggregate, and I've almost exclusively released music for free, as a hobby outside my day job. Thanks to labels I have reached an audience without doing much else than producing music and suggesting my music to labels. This has gotten me an audience where I might not have found one myself, for example in Russia (because I released an EP with a Russian netlabel in the mid 00s that then caught on because they promoted their catalog by hosting regular parties).
You just have to be very wary, as I suggested, of what labels you sign with and what conditions. This is easy for beginners to overlook.
But by all means, tell me more about why I should spend time "making a label" instead of making music, and explain how running a business around my music will affect my artistic integrity positively.
Not at all. Galleries don't necessarily own the work they're showing, likely can't legally modify the paintings & that painting is likely 1 of a kind vs a copy meant for a specific application. The musicians/engineers were paid for their work, and, barring some gross legal oversight on Universal's part, everyone involved understands that the audio can be edited when they do this.
I feel bad for the artists and engineers
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(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.
It's pretty subtle. I could imagine that in pieces with a lot of long sustains it would start to be annoying, especially since you can't unhear it.
(Sennheiser wired headphones listening on my Android phone, in case it matters)
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/
It largely stopped me knowingly buying anything associated with Sony.
Of course, they always claim that. Never mind that it's theoretically impossible. Such marketing should earn a fraud prosecution.
Lossy compression algorithms specifically compress out everything imperceptible to human hearing.
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!
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.
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.
> It is modifying what the artist intended you to hear in a destructive way. It is destroying the original performances.
also applies to lossy encoding.
The whole point of audio watermarking is that it survives lossy compression. Inaudibility is merely a secondary concern.
This is an adversarial relationship, and one that the audio watermarking is doomed to lose. By and large, lossy codecs succeed in transparency, and therefore as an inevitable consequence, watermarking fails at it. After decades of development, lossy codecs are just too good - there's nowhere left to hide information.
(It's also worth noting that the consumer benefits from the quality tradeoff that compression makes, in the form of decreased storage and bandwidth. They don't benefit from the audio watermarking at all.)
I'm unable to load the article and haven't heard one in real life, but in theory it could be done in a way that is imperceptible to human ears but detectable by a program. E.g. imagine masking specific frequencies within a noisy section of the video.
There should be less destructive ways for studios to do this, but unless it's in the video or audio signal it doesn't stand a chance of working reliably.
To be clear, I'm also against any kind of watermark, but I'd rather it be done with an imperceptible (to me) audio signal than with a constant graphical watermark as is usually the case. Actually, graphical watermarks could be smarter and less obtrusive as well.
> The difference is that the graphical watermark on e.g. a photograph usually isn't there when you've paid for it.
The same could be the case for these audio ones. It's user hostile if this is done on already paid content (but again, I can't read the original article to confirm).
[1] https://creativepro.com/major-movie-studios-specify-digital-...
[2] https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/440...
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_mark
As for more subtle changes, what constitutes a "plausible sound" in any given context is an AI-complete problem. Sure on a particular song, you might get away with e.g. tinkering with the reverb a bit, or changing the tempo by 0.5% - but how can you possibly do that in the general case?
Remember - all such changes have to be audibly salient to humans, because that's the only thing guaranteed to survive.
You’re saying it’s ok to decimate it - as long it’s replaced with some “plausible” proxy? Plausible decided by who, the artist or business requirements?
We tolerate Netflix releasing films in less than 4k. They do that because of a practical business benefit (cost). Similarly, Universal is making a compromise in the artist's vision to meet a business requirement. I think if the compromise is sufficiently small and the business benefit is sufficiently large, it's ok to do this.
When you're passive listening, you're only perceiving the "outlines" of the music, but listening actively reveals a lot of details, and this kind of wobbling becomes both more noticeable and disturbing.
When listening the music actively, anyone can distinguish between natural and unnatural sounds, and this will bother many people if they listen more actively.
You're assuming that perceptual audio coders do a perfect job at encoding what can be heard* and not encoding what can't be heard*. This isn't true in both directions — they encode detail that can't be heard* in the source, and lose detail that can be heard in the source*.
*This is contextual, depending heavily on the listener and the listening conditions.
The system is called CBET and it's based on the psychoacoustic model as well, except it determines the level at which watermark should be injected at. High enough that it passes codecs easily, but just below perception so you generally can't detect the tones that it has added to the audio.
The trade is that CBET only moves about 8 bits/second of information through the side channel, which is just enough to push a station ID and timestamp through the channel for Nielsen's ratings purposes.
However I'm awfully curious about this system, especially "high enough that it passes codecs easily". I would naively expect that to be highly dependent on the codec and bitrate chosen, and further expect the range between "inaudible" and "codec-passing" to be negative for many common untransparent lossy profiles, like 128kbps mp3. Where can I read more?
There are 10 bands, each of which can carry 1 of 18 tones. 16 tones are to signal, so the stream is 4 bits wide, and the other two tones are used as a "STOP" and "SYNC" marker in the data stream.
All bands carry identical information, but each bit within a band is encoded with a different tone than any other band. So, it appears random or uncorrelated at first glance, but you can see the pattern pretty quickly if you do a long enough analysis. The same message gets identically repeated 12 to 13 times per minute and the message only changes once per minute. Here's an example isolation of the signal [1].
The coder monitors incoming audio and does a psychoacoustic pass to determine which level the tones should be injected at. If it can't find a good level for a tone, it uses the lowest possible level... which usually works out fine due to the 10 redundant signals in the watermark.
Encoders like MP3 see the injected tones as signal and will make the bits available to ensure they're encoded rather than correctly masking them out as non-audible material. The 10 bands help here as well, as even if the encoder fails to code the signal in one band, there's usually enough redundant bands that you can successfully decode the watermark.
[1]: https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/CBET
However, encoding a series of highly discernable tones into the audio is just dumb. Instead they should use phase modulation at low frequencies. Current compression models don't play with subtle changes of meter much, because they mostly use local encoding and there's not much room for improved compression with (non-audible) modulation. Of course, if Universal wanted to be able to accurately detect 5 second clips (rather than 2 minute songs) this would be a lot more difficult... and of course they want every thing, at the expense of listener experience.
A transmitter could transmit a weak signal in a specific pattern on a number of arbitrary preselected frequencies. They would more-or-less seem like noise lost in the noise floor. Only when you specifically filter for the specific set of frequencies can you discern the pattern that was put there that could not appear by chance. You don't even need to use the same frequencies throughout the transmission. As long as the schedule is decided up-front it can serve like a one-time pad for encryption.
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.
Surely a watermark shouldn't be removable? Yet this seems trivially removable.
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.
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.