YouTube

Music Is Just 4.3% of YouTube Traffic, Research Shows

August 17, 2016By rightstech

Music videos and music-related video content account for just 4.3% of overall YouTube traffic, according to data now released by San Francisco-based Pexeso. By stark comparison, gaming-related content accounts for 33.4% of the total, which mirrors the massive draw of channels like Twitch.

Entertainment-focused content also dwarfs music content, according to the data, with an 18.9% chunk. Random content uploaded by people, bloggers, and YouTube personalities also beat music content, accounting for 14.3% of the pie. Other categories like Sports and Film & Animation also trump music.

Source: Music Is Just 4.3% of YouTube Traffic, Research Shows

Inside YouTube’s War With the Music Industry

August 16, 2016By rightstech

Like any site, YouTube can stream material without artists’ permission thanks to 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The law allows companies to post copyrighted content online if they agree to take it down upon request. But in the YouTube age, this means artists’ representatives need to monitor hundreds of millions of new videos every day.

YouTube says it has addressed the issue, spending $60 million to build a “Content ID” program, which uses digital “fingerprints” to identify pirated material.This system catches 99.5 percent of copyrighted material, says Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s chief business officer. “I challenge somebody to find a better system of copyright management anywhere,” says Kyncl. “It’s been nearly a decade of us investing in the system when no one else does anything.”

Source: Inside YouTube’s War With the Music Industry – Rolling Stone

YouTube strikes deal with Canadian mechanical rights agency CMRRA

August 16, 2016By rightstech

The deal marks the first major agreement for reproduction rights between YouTube and CMRRA in the territory – and comes less than a month after Canadian society SOCAN announced it was moving into mechanical rights with the purchase of Audiam.

CMRRA called the deal “a major step forward for Canada” – and an agreement which “completely changes the landscape for rights administration in this country”.

Source: YouTube strikes deal with Canadian mechanical rights agency CMRRA – Music Business Worldwide

Tech Giants Boast an Edge in Music Streaming

July 25, 2016By rightstech

Because streaming music advances their other ambitions, Apple Music, Amazon, Alphabet’s Google and YouTube units, don’t need their services to be hugely profitable, though none of them are selling subscriptions at prices that suggest a willingness to lose money. That gives the tech companies a major advantage over smaller companies like Pandora Media Inc., Spotify AB and French counterpart Deezer, whose main businesses are music streaming.

“I think that any company that has some other motive [for offering streaming] is going to win,” said Paul Young, a music-business professor at the USC Thornton School of Music. That is at least partly because the music-only companies are burdened by heavy costs. The paid services typically spend 70% of their revenue on licensing music and much of the rest on acquiring customers.

Source: Tech Giants Boast an Edge in Music Streaming – WSJ

An End To 4 Minute Music Videos: How The Music Industry Can Fix Its Their YouTube Woes

July 25, 2016By rightstech

The artist-and-labels-versus-YouTube crisis is going to run and run, even if some form of settlement is actually reached…the divisions and ill feeling run too deep to be fixed solely by a commercial deal. What’s more, a deal with better rates won’t even fix the underlying commercial problems.

Music videos under perform on YouTube because they don’t fit YouTube in 2016 in the way they did YouTube in 2010. The 4 minute pop video was a product of the MTV broadcast era and still worked well enough when online video was all about short clips. But the world has moved on, as has short form video (in its new homes Snapchat, Musical.ly and Vine).

Source: An End To 4 Minute Music Videos: How Record Labels And Artists Can Fix Their YouTube Woes – hypebot

Is YouTube wrecking the music industry – or putting new artists in the spotlight?

July 19, 2016By rightstech

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.

Source: Is YouTube wrecking the music industry – or putting new artists in the spotlight? | Business | The Guardian

Apple Proposes Simplified Statutory Licensing Scheme to D.C.

July 16, 2016By rightstech

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

YouTube: 50% of Music Biz’s Revenue on Site Comes From Content ID

July 13, 2016By rightstech

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

Industry Out of Harmony With YouTube on Tracking of Copyrighted Music

June 28, 2016By rightstech

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

Rocking the Rights-Tech Boat in a Safe Harbor

June 22, 2016By rightstech

Any day now, according to the scuttlebutt in copyright policy circles, the U.S. Copyright Office could release its findings from its study of Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ordered up last year by the House Judiciary Committee, which is conducting a review of the DMCA and U.S. copyright law in general. Along with those findings, the Copyright Office is widely expected to offer recommendations to Congress for changes to the 512 “safe harbor” provisions, including perhaps replacing the current “notice-and-takedown” rules with a “notice-and-staydown”
requirement.