I know this question has probably been asked and debated, but here I go anyways.

Why can’t artists upload fully mixed tracks?

Now let me state that I understand completely why you would not want someone submitting an entire song. However, if the song were to be submitted with the stems comprising the song, what would be argument against it?

I have a lot of original material that I would like submit for others to review and remix, but it is a pain to chop it down into small samples. I wouldn’t even be opposed to submitting the stems without the complete track.

It just seems a strange that vocalists can submit entire acapellas but producers can’t submit an entire track. If the spirit of ccMixter is for remixing, I don’t see an issue with uploading entire “unremixed” tracks so long as the stems are provided for use in other remixes.

If someone could please provide an argument as to why this would be a bad idea, I am all ears.

there’s nothing wrong with submitting song stems that are compromised of full length tracks. e.g. 4 minutes of a piano track. Also, if you submit the individual stems as part of the package, it won’t be too much frowned upon, if you submit a “preview mix”.

However for practical purposes, it makes the most sense if the preview mix does not have vocals on it. If it is a vocal mixed in song, most people try to keep that mix off-site and just put a link to it in the description. The rationale being, that a mix with vocals already in gives too little remixing freedom (exceptions proving the rule).

To illustrate, here’s what I have done in the past without having gotten grief over it:

Example A (individual stems + instrumental backing track mix): here

Example B (stems from a full vocal mixed song, where the original fully mixed song is kept outside of ccMixter, with an external link referring to the original song): here

Fantastic. Thanks for the replies. I look forward to adding more material for others to sample and mix.