Sharing Your Music Collection

I have a large music collection , vinyl, CD and digital. Since I became a home worker I have taken to sharing what I am listening to on Instagram.

Now Instagram used to have a 20 second limit, then it went up to a minute and then dropped back to 15 seconds for video. When it was a minute I posted some video that got culled but I read up and found there was a 30 second limit on music should share on Instagram and Facebook , although some artists (or rather their record companies) are extremely aggressive if you share even 15 seconds (Led Zeppelin I’m looking at you) although these are usually OK if you submit a dispute and your song samples are under the 30 second limit.

I’ve written about Copyright in other vocal posts and basically I am just saying how good these albums are and suggesting that people, if they like the music, should go and get themselves a copy. So really I am trying to promote sales of the music, but rules are rules and when you are using a platform for free you have to abide by them.

I’ve also used music for slideshows on my YouTube channel and that is a bit more awkward. If I want some music and it’s not on YouTube I will put together a slideshow and hope that it doesn’t get pulled, and touch wood, usually they stay up there although there small disputes, but as I am not making money from the videos or being defamatory they seem to be Ok and get a few view. The lead video on here is “Billy Bolero” by Alex Harvey which I think is a wonderful record though not easy to track down these days in digital format.

Back to my Instagram Channel shares. Instagram stopped allowing me to record videos (though I could do Reels) , but in a series of experiments I found I could put together a one minute video and then just add it to an Instagram post. The problem being that the camera on my phone is 16x9 or 9x16 but the picture Instagram wants is 4x3 (12x9) so you end up losing the top of your video, meaning to have to concentrate what you want to film on the bottom of your video.

Then I found an amazing app called Youcut on the google Play store. This allows you to do lots of editing of captured video , including flipping , and cutting the bottom half of the video. It is simple and quick and that is just a tiny bit of what it does.

With the new one minute limit , plus the thirty second sample limit I decided I could put together three twenty second or four fifteen second album samples in a video without usually incurring the wrath of the sound censors. My Instagram user id is mikeydred96 and you are best tracking it on the Instagram app but you may be able to see it here.

So a combination of Instagram awkwardness , censorship and Youcut usefulness makes it very easy for me to post one minute music sharing videos on Instagram (which are then posted on Facebook).

I do like to share music with people and to push people to at least sample the things that I like, and with the addition of video people get an impression of what albums look like as well as sound like, Also I say what the thing is which you sometimes miss when it;s on the radio even though a lot of shows now publish their playlists online.

But these days with apps like Shazam and published playlists it is usually easy to track down any music that you might hear.