After uploading a track to ccMixter the moderators and/or administrators might put the song into a ‘Moderated’ state. A track can also be marked as moderated if several users ‘flag’ the upload.

There are several reasons why your track may be moderated, but the main reason is that your upload violates the terms of usage of the site

Chief amongst those are:

1. using audio material that you don’t have permission to use. This can be anything from:

- material from an All Rights Reserved album used without permission.

- an audio clip from an All Rights Reserved TV show or movie.

- material from another web site that is licensed from some use, but does not explicitly allow for re-licensing.

- a ‘cover’ of a melody you do not have the rights to relicense under Creative Commons

Basically we can’t host anything that you do not have permission to use.

2. The general audio quality of the upload is deemed to be too poor for us to host. If your upload sits red-lined at 0db or has enough digital distortion that it may hurt the speakers, headphones or ears of the listener than it will be moderated, if not removed entirely from the site.

3. Your upload was clearly uploaded into the wrong area. If there are instruments in your track then it is not an a cappella. If there are several instruments in your track all mixed together then it is not a sample. Repeated abuse of this nature will very, very quickly lead to banning from the entire site. Everybody makes mistakes, very few people make the same honest mistake five times in a row.

4. Remixes that are not properly attributed. We take artist’s rights very seriously here and if you don’t go to the trouble of properly attributing the sources of you work then expect your tracks to be moderated.

5. An abuse of the tagging system doesn’t sound like much but if you mark your upload with every single tag that you can find we consider that to be ‘spam’ because your track will be search hit more, radio played more often and show up on more tag browser listing, 90% of which will be inappropriate, misleading fellow remixers looking for samples and visitors looking for music in a specific genre.

6. The community here at ccMixter has previously spoken very loudly that they do not appreciate hate in uploads. Uploads containing speech deemed to be a personal or stereotyping attack will inundate the admins with violation flaggings from the community. We don’t like to be inundated by angry and upset members of the site.

7. ‘Bumping’ is when you delete a track and immediately upload it again moving to the top of the remix list. This is obviously unfair to folks with newer remixes. If you want to rename your track then use ‘Edit’ from the songs page. If you want to replace your track use ‘Manage Files’. Otherwise the system will detect bumping and automatically moderate your track.

8. Don’t remix yourself. Please.

9. You uploaded a fully mixed track without stems. We do not accept fully mixed tracks unless you sample somebody from ccMixter. If you upload a fully mixed track with only your sources then upload individual stems/samples using ‘Manage Files’ menu item and mark them as ‘sample’.

Creative Commons is very small artist’s rights advocacy non-profit run by a handful people and ccMixter is offered completely free without restrictions except that we all play nice and stick to the terms. Administering this site means striking a balance between what is best for the community and right for the individual artists that participate while keeping the site humming along.

Considering these factors, sometimes decisions about moderating a track are made hastily in a ‘better to be safe than sued’ frame of mind and a moderated track is definitely open for appeal by contacting the admins using the link at the bottom of every page on this site.

OR

you can just skip that step, remove the track the site, fix the problem and re-upload it.

However, if you ignore the moderation and just delete and re-upload the same track without making any changes, then you run the risk of having your account banned from the site even if it turns out the track ultimately had no problems.

And no, we don’t sit around thinking this stuff up lol, all of these happen with some regularity. If you stumbled into one of these situations and you think the site could be designed better to avoid this then please let us know!

Thanks,
Victor

edited 2007/11/22