As artists, record labels, music publishers and managers line up to lobby the US Congress and the European Union, it might seem as if YouTube is the worst thing to happen to the music business since Napster in 1999. The streaming service, the aggrieved parties claim, is causing a massive “value gap” that is unsustainable.
Meanwhile, every major artist has a channel on YouTube and wouldn’t dream of releasing a new record without YouTube involved in its launch.
Apple has submitted a preliminary proposal to the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board to simplify the way music-streaming companies pay songwriters and publishers — in a way that could make it more expensive for rivals like Spotify and YouTube to keep offering free streaming.
Right now, streaming companies pay songwriters and publishers between 10.5 percent and 12 percent of their overall revenue, according to a complicated formula. (Labels and other owners of recording copyrights negotiate their own terms.) The money is divided into public performance and mechanical royalties, then paid to collecting societies and publishers.
Source: Apple Proposes Simplified Statutory Licensing Scheme to D.C. | Billboard
In recent months Russia’s once sin-binned social network, vKontakte, has inked licensing deals with Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, in part to power a new mobile subscription streaming app.
Today, bringing to a close a two-year lawsuit against VK, Universal has announced that it’s done the same. The major has reached a settlement with VK parent Mail.ru and licensed its social media platforms – VK, Odnoklassniki and My World – for future use of video and audio content from UMG artists like Taylor Swift.
Source: This deal will change everything for the music business in Russia – Music Business Worldwide
The music industry has been complaining that YouTube doesn’t do enough to combat piracy. But Google says record labels are making millions from YouTube’s Content ID copyright-flagging system, and that the process is used 50 times more frequently than DMCA takedown notices.
In a report released Wednesday, “How Google Fights Piracy,” the Internet giant says that when music companies find copyrighted material they own on YouTube with Content ID, they choose to monetize more than 95% of those claims by opting to leave the content up on the platform to generate advertising (rather than blocking it). Indeed, 50% of the music industry’s YouTube revenue comes from fan content claimed via Content ID, according to Google.
Source: YouTube: 50% of Music Biz’s Revenue on Site Comes From Content ID | Variety
Filming Virtual Reality can be eye-wateringly expensive, with The New York Times said to have spent up to $100,000 a minute on its recent VR film The Displaced. Little wonder that U2 and Muse’s excursions into VR were backed by Apple, its $200bn cash pile and a corporate taste in music.
Put like this, the appeal of combining Virtual Reality and music seems at first glance like an expensive trinket to sit alongside 4K TVs in the home of the rich and easily swayed. But dig a little deeper into VR and a new thread emerges, where independent artists are driving experimentation in a technology that could – depending on who you talk to – transform music listening itself, reinvent the music video, fundamentally change live music or fade out again like just another fad.
One of blockchain’s most vocal bell-ringers is the Grammy Award-winning UK singer, songwriter and producer Imogen Heap. “Blockchain is completely enabling us to rethink the basic, core structure of how monetary distribution works in the industry,” Heap told City A.M. “It can be used to build a united platform and create an ecosystem, but most importantly builds innovation under the standards that make sense for artists.”
The research would seem to back up Heap’s point. In a report this week released by the Blockchain for Creative Industries cluster at Middlesex University and the Featured Artists’ Coalition (FAC), researchers found four areas where using blockchain could be a genuine asset to the music industry.
If blockch
ain technology can help the commercial and contractual relationships in music keep pace with technology and the communication between artists and fans then it could be truly revolutionary, writes Nick Mason from Pink Floyd in the foreword to a new report on the subject.
The “Music on the blockchain” report from a research team at Middlesex University, continues a concerted effort led by musician and technologist Imogen Heap to get artists a fairer deal using blockchain designs. Heap has brought together members of the Ethereum community, ConsesnSys and a host of others at London’s Sonos studios.
Source: Pink Floyd: Blockchain technology in music could be ‘truly revolutionary’
According to a new mid-year report from trusted market monitor BuzzAngle, US single track download sales fell by a whopping 24.2% in the first half of 2016 compared to the same period in 2015.
Total digital song sales hit 410.5m in the six months to end of June this year, compared to 541.2m in H1 2015 – a loss of more than 130m downloads.
Source: Download sales have fallen 24% in the past year in the US market – Music Business Worldwide
According to a report from Norwegian news outlet Dagens Næringsliv, streaming music platform Tidal may not be paying out the royalties it owes to musicians and record labels in the company’s home country of Norway.
The article states that some 1,000 independent record labels haven’t been paid for the streaming activity connected to their artists since this past January. Most of the labels that are experiencing this issue receive their payments through an intermediary organization called Phonofile, which collects the royalties and disperses them according to reports that are supposed to be produced by the streaming platforms. Apparently, Tidal has both failed to create the necessary day-to-day reports of what has been played, and it has also missed quite a few months of cutting checks.
Source: Tidal Failed To Pay Indie Labels In Norway For Months [REPORT] – hypebot
At the core of the dispute is the Content ID system that YouTube built nine years ago in an attempt to turn videos uploaded by users into a business opportunity for copyright owners, while boosting its own advertising revenues. YouTube says Content ID works nearly perfectly to help record labels protect their music and make money from it, and keeps getting smarter.
But many in the music industry say the system isn’t automatically identifying many of their recordings when users have altered or combined them—or occasionally for no apparent reason at all. Furthermore, labels charge that Content ID doesn’t scan the YouTube channels managed by major TV networks and smaller networks such as Fullscreen and AwesomenessTV, many of which feature amateurs covering popular songs.
Source: Industry Out of Harmony With YouTube on Tracking of Copyrighted Music – WSJ