justanoldmuso, you can't cheat the algorithm.

Originally Posted By: justanoldmuso
...do they have a bank of supercomputers checking the zillions of songs submitted before this latest one from the young musician. ? ie HOW DO THEY CHECK ?
it would seem an impossibility to me...

You are right about this. They have this proprietary technology to check the pitch pattern of your audio against their massive copyright database.

The technology is scary. Take YouTube Content ID as an example.

Years ago I was working on a TV show trailer video editing project. I found a copyrighted score music, really liked it. So I downloaded the music, dragged into a waveform editing software, changed the tempo, transposed the pitch, applied a multi band compression and a dynamic EQ, exported to a new wav file, inserted into my video project.

Guess what? When I uploaded my final video to YouTube, it took YouTube less than 20 seconds to detect my audio contains copyrighted content, and issued me a copyright claim, the video was instantly demonetized. I was shocked by the technology.

The detection was based on the relative pitch pattern, regardless of the key, tempo, or volume.

It was a mess. Later I had to drag that copyrighted music into a DAW, quantized it, added a background cello with low volume, re-insert to the video, re-upload to YouTube, to circumvent the Content ID detection.

Lesson learned, don't mess with the Content ID. Always remix a copyrighted music before use.

A Canadian music producer, singer songwriter, composer, and professional guitarist.