180 Artists, Labels Including Taylor Swift Take On YouTube, Join Copyright Plea (cnn.com)

Chloe Melas, reporting for CNN: Taylor Swift, U2, Kings of Leon and Paul McCartney are some of the 180 recording artists and labels petitioning Congress to reform the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (D.M.C.A.) In an open letter to Congress, they write that the current online copyright law has allowed YouTube and other sites to "generate huge profits by creating ease of use for consumers to carry almost every recorded song in history in their pocket via a smartphone, while songwriters' and artists' earnings continue to diminish." The letter, which is being published in The Hill and Politico this week, goes on to call for "sensible reform." "We ask you to enact sensible reform that balances the interests of creators with the interests of the companies who exploit music for their financial enrichment. It's only then that consumers will truly benefit." YouTube's parent company, Google, declined to comment Tuesday, but in a statement in April said, "Any claim that the DMCA safe harbors are responsible for a 'value gap' for music on YouTube is simply false." This comes days after musician Trent Reznor said YouTube is built on the back of stolen content.

Comments

Less money but more creators?

[innocent_white_lamb]

There may be less money in this stuff for the creators, but it's my understanding that there are more creators and more content being created than ever before.

So why does the less money part matter to the public and all of the creators who aren't expecting to buy a yacht or two with their earnings? In the "old world", most of those folks wouldn't be able to buy a yacht anyway, and their creations wouldn't be seen or heard by more than six people -- now they can perform for the world.

It does need Reform

[OverlordQ]

But not what they want. YouTube's system is too easy to abuse by large players to shut down legitimate content.

Bullshit.

[CrashNBrn]

There has been far more music created that is NOT available ANYWHERE than ALL of the Music services combined.

they write that the current online copyright law has allowed YouTube and other sites to "generate huge profits by creating ease of use for consumers to carry almost every recorded song in history

How many songs have been recorded since the beginning of time?

James Piazza, Music Archivist, Audiophile
Paul Mawhinney's record collection consists of ~1 million LPs and ~1.5 million singles. The Library of Congress conducted a study of Mawhinney's collection and found that only 17% of the titles were available to the public on CD. A smaller fraction still were made commercially available in a digital file format like MP3 or FLAC.

And to take it one step further, the majority of the LPs in Paul's collection are American and UK recordings. That doesn't even begin to consider the musical output of the rest of planet earth.

The iTunes library (or that of Spotify for that matter) comprise a tiny, tiny fraction of the history of recorded music. 26 million digital songs is a starting point, but the world's catalog of recorded sound extends so much farther than that.

And once you've finished the lifetimes it would take to play through official recordings from the Library of Congress and other national archives, you could then move on to the libraries of the universities of the world which will open you up to demos and performances from some of the greatest composers in the world, none of which are available commercially.

Without some concrete figures from the LOC, national archives and from universities, I cannot provide even a ballpark of an exact total track duration, but I hope my answer gives you some perspective beyond the limitations of digital music.