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Google Releases Study Defending YouTube's Value To Music Biz; Trade Bodies Hit Back (billboard.com)
The ongoing tussle between YouTube and the music industry took a new turn this week when Google assured everyone that its video platform doesn't have any negative impact on the other streaming music services -- despite all the free music it offers. From a report: A Google-commissioned report into how YouTube impacts on the wider music economy has -- somewhat unsurprisingly -- found that the hugely popular, yet much-maligned platform significantly drives sales and stops users from visiting pirate music services. According to a European study carried out by RBB Economics, if music content was removed from YouTube around 85 percent of the time that users spend on the platform would switch to lower value channels, such as TV, radio or internet radio. RBB claimed there would also be a significant increase in time spent listening to pirated content (up 29 percent), while only 15 percent of heavy users, defined as someone who watches more than 20 hours of music videos per month, would switch to higher value offerings like subscription streaming services. In the U.K., that number increases to 19 percent; in France it's 12 percent. [...] In response, music trade bodies poured scorn on the paper's findings. "Google's latest publicity push once again seeks to distract from the fact that YouTube, essentially the world's largest on-demand music service, is failing to license music on a fair basis and compensate artists and producers properly by claiming it is not liable for the music it is making available," reads a statement from IFPI. "Services like YouTube, that are not licensing music on fair terms, hinder the development of a sustainably healthy digital music market," claimed the international trade body, repeating its regular call for tighter regulation around safe harbour licensing.
Maybe artists could career change into a field with less chances of having their work pirated, like, software development.
If I turn off the screen on my phone so I can stick it in my pocket and just listen, the YouTube app pauses the video.
Its out of the box, there is no putting Music back on old platforms like radio and TV and controlling the releases like they used to. Seems odd the music industry is fighting it.
The "music industry" will not be happy until they get _ALL_ the money in the world.
Anything else is "unfair" to them.
There is no 'claim' the safe harbor explicitly makes them not liable for content uploaded by users. In fact YouTube goes above and beyond doing content-id and allowing the music industry to take revenue or block videos.
There's also the fact that the artist that made the music you are listening to isn't being paid, and if they cant get paid often enough, they can't make any more songs for you to like. They are not indentured servants that exist solely for your entertainment. Google are slime, and their logic would make a troll smack its forehead. They are also hypocrites of the highest order: they themselves are attempting to bring the wrath of God down on Waymo for doing in essence the same thing they are trying to defend here. Rationalize all you like, but don't kid yourself about their ethics.
I'm no fan of Alphabet, but the music industry just had its best year in 20 thanks to streaming and digital music. Youtube is a big part of that ecosystem. The music industry may have legit complaints, but digital music hurting them isn't one of them.
Last I looked when someone pays for a streaming service and listens to a preferred less popular artist all the time the most of the money *STILL* goes to the most popular song writer. Even the most popular writers get an unfavorable deal. And the performers are SoL when they aren't the song writer.
So why haven't you coded an app to play youtube with the screen off? Ideally your app would extract just the audio from youtube videos to save data. Why haven't you done it yet?
App Store won't allow it.
Ummmm computer says No.
Bullshit. You can sideload an apk. It doesn't even have to be an apk, you could make a single page webapp to do it. We're talking about something that involves at most an html5 audio player locally and an ajax proxy in the cloud. There are plenty of free open source tools to extract youtube audio.
Do you have a link regarding Google and Waymo?
They're not getting paid by the record companies either; record sales haven't been profitable for artists for ages due to the way record company contracts work. The only way for artists to get paid is to go on tour; it's been like this for quite some time.
Youtube is the only way I've found to actually listen to any new music to see if I like it or not, since they don't play anything worthwhile on the radio these days.
The only way for artists to get paid is to go on tour;
Yep if you're a musician but you hate to travel, you'll never make a professional career of it.
If it's their official channel, which it often is these days, then they're getting paid. Maybe not 'enough', but they're getting paid. The few instances where I tend to see lots of alternate versions going up usually is because it's an artist that didn't bother - and even then, Youtube will crack down on that, either transferring the ad revenue or muting the video.
More than that though, Youtube and streaming services serve the same function that radio used to, in that it exposes users to new music/artists. I know I've found news bands through Youtube specifically that I'm now a fan of, buying albums/etc, that I never would have stumbled across were it not for those services. I've also used it in place of streaming music when I was working at places that wouldn't allow pandora/spotify/etc, but had Youtube allowed, specifically to listen to music.
I listen to the same song again and again. The artist got paid once.
I buy CD's used. The artists doesn't get paid there.
I share CD's. Guess what -- the artist doesn't get paid.
Quit playing the "starving artist isn't get paid" card -- because there are numerous legal examples.
Maybe you missed the memo that the RIAA are the the biggest thieves -- NOT the consumers.
People who pirate regularly spend MORE on films and BUY more.
Google is not different from anyone else. You are conflating the (free) distribution of music on YouTube as if it is the ONLY source of income. This is false. Artists aren't making a living off of YouTube even if ZERO of their music is "pirated."
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Fuck You Red Cross for hijacking the + operator and the color red hundreds of years AFTER the Templars.
Ticket sales and merch (and licensing for movies etc, if you're really famous) are where the artists make their money. I can never remember where I read this (possibly Lawrence Lessig), but a witty summary that has stuck with me: To economic historians of the future, the Rolling Stones will be remembered primarily as very successful T-shirt salesmen.
Copy"right" needs to die. The idea that all innovation and the arts would disappear if there was no copy"right" is just a ruse to give an elite an entitlement they do not deserve. It's another redistribution of wealth scheme no different than redistribution wealth from the rich to the poor (like with welfare). We need to end such programs and end the monopoly (that is what copy"right" is) that no other industry gets. Can you imagine if Ford got to dictate who could sell its cars?
Well, copy"right" owners do that every day. And things have gotten much much worse in the last 100 years. It's no longer a limited 7 year monopoly. It's no longer for the public benefit (in practice we will NEVER get public domain access to the content produced today). At least 20 years ago business owners could buy VHS and DVDs and then rent them out such that we had thousands and thousands of sources to get content from (and that was only because of favourable court rulings). Today your limited to one of a handful of companies to obtain content from online and then often its not available anywhere legally. We've got at best four sources for obtaining content via means the law provides Hulu, Amazon, iTunes, and Netflix.
It's time to end copy"right". Come check out Somalia Fest 2017 (https://www.somaliafest.com/) this summer and help us do just that- maybe we can't end it overnight- but certainly there are things we can do at the state level to hinder the ability of the industry to effectively enforce copy"right" online via stronger privacy rules, protection for ISPs instituting strong privacy rules (like no logging) and taking down the barriers government and industry have put in the way to hinder competition in the ISP market (we already did some of this in NH and I have several ISPs including fiber internet options to choose from now). Somilar Fest is an event built and run by principled libertarians and voluntarists themed around many Pirate Party issues: civil rights, direct democracy and participation in government, reform of copyright and patent law, free sharing of knowledge (open content), information privacy, transparency, freedom of information, anti-corruption and Internet neutrality.
Immediately following Somilar Fest is Porcfest- which is another great event held at the same site. This event attracts thousands of people each year who want more freedom and liberty. Online and off. The idea being no victim no crime. No violence, theft (ie depriving someone of real goods they own, that can't happen with copy"right", because it is a copy and the original possessor doesn't lose anything), fraud, or coercion then there is no real crime.
The Free State Project runs Porcfest and the migration of principled libertarians and voluntersts to New Hampshire is having a huge impact on freedom here. From marijuana decriminalization to the elimination of permission slips (mandatory permits) for concealed carry of firearms. There have been many legal cases entrenching the publics right to record police and other government officials and police accountability groups regularly roam the streets keeping an eye on abusive police behaviour. There are even people fighting drivers licenses, license plates, and vehicle registration. Many states don't require inspections already and New Hampshire doesn't require car insurance already (liability still exists with the driver- it's not the wild west here). Drivers licenses did not come about for "safety" so arguing we can't get rid of them because "safety" is non-sense. Until the late 1960s there were still states with drivers licenses that had no mandatory driving tests to even get a drivers license. Drivers licenses were about control and putting horse traffic first. Cars today are significantly safer than when the 'right to travel' was engrained in our constitution so the idea we need drivers licenses for safety is irrational. Mandatory car insurance would make more sense as those who were real dangers would become uninsurable due to the liability issue posed by unsafe drivers- yet
Google's YouTube is like the pirate radio of today. I'm sure many at Google fail to see the problem which in many ways is the problem. Artists who lose money from people infringing on their music rights. Be interested to see how Google would react if advertisers would bypass Google and just develop their own ads? Google could do more to protect music copyrights but they don't see it as a real problem.
"is failing to license music on a fair basis"
Define a "fair basis". Remember this is the industry that claimed they had a copyright over "happy birthday to you", a melody that is well over 100 years old whos likely "creator" died in the 40s. Not long ago a court case found that they had no standing to have ever claimed the copyright let alone for the decades they have extracted millions of dollars out of people. I think these people have a disturbingly broad sense of "fair".
Your joke aside, it IS complete BS. Pumpkin seeds are loaded with fiber. Eating nothing but those would cause one to shit frequently and often.
Why is this 'artist' not getting paid? Why are they doing work that they aren't being paid to do? People who do such things are usually called 'hobbyists' or doing it simply because they can, they don't expect to get paid for doing it. I fixed my garbage disposal the other day, should I expect someone to pay me as a 'plumber'?
I write business documents all day long, I can call myself a 'business artist' if you like, does that mean that everyone who reads my work product should pay me for access to it? If I create a document & release it to the world why should anyone pay me for reading it or making a copy of it?
If an 'artist' wants to make money from the work they do then maybe they should work for a company that will pay them to do that work rather than trying to extract an artificial toll for the 'work product'. Or maybe they should become a PERFORMER and get paid to perform the work. What's that? They can't sing and/or have no stage presence...sell the right to perform the work to Beyonce, JZ, Taylor Swift or any one of thousands of other performers.
If someone expects to get paid for 'work product' perhaps they should work for someone who will pay them to sit around all day creating that work product, anything else is just doing it for 'shits & giggles'.
The concept of 'copyright' whereby someone is allowed to control when or if data is copied disappeared as a relevant concept as soon as the first personal computer affordable by the masses was created. It took a little bit longer & the development of cheap & ubiquitous 'data transmission' to really kill it but this has been drop dead obvious to the 'masses' for 10 years at least but apparently 'artists' & music companies haven't caught on...it will probably take another 30 odd years for them to do so. Between now & then we can expect more loud bitching & moaning by people who think they should get paid for something they worked on 30 years ago but haven't done anything relevant since. In the mean time, the ones that wake up & recognize that they need to get paid for the ACT of creating something (including the act of performing it) will be far happier & the ones that will succeed (where that means being able to 'monetize the act of creation' not the creation itself).
Since I've started listening to YouTube music videos at work, I have ended up purchasing more music than I would have had I not been listening to YouTube music videos.
Obviously they're profitable on some level, or the musicians wouldn't be signing the contracts. At the very least, record companies are able to promote artists. 99% of musicians are not great artists, they just have a studio behind them giving them support.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Every artist and label under the sun posts all sorts of their content to YouTube. They then complain that people are listening to their music for free on YouTube? Then stop putting it there!
Create your own service where you can charge users every time they consume your content then. Yes, there are average Joes and Janes that post videos with their content as well, but when they're putting their content on YouTube as well, they really don't get to complain. Soon as they stop posting their stuff to YouTube, then they can complain and go after the average person posting with their content.
Youtube is the only way I've found to actually listen to any new music to see if I like it or not, since they don't play anything worthwhile on the radio these days.
I sometimes find worthwhile new music on the radio, and use SoundHound to identify it. But yes, YouTube is great when it comes to mining for music, either new stuff or stuff that's just new to me. I can spend hours following their sidebar recommendations. And I sometimes use youtube-dl to download a video and then rip the sound, just for the sake of convenience. Then, if I find myself actually listening to it, I buy the CD; yep, I'm old skool that way.
Except for music I simply can't find elsewhere new or used, or where the disc is out-of-print and being sold for stupidly high prices, I only download for evaluation. If I like it after several listens, I buy it. I've purchased a LOT more CD's as a result of YouTube than I would have bought if YT didn't exist. And any music that I downloaded but didn't subsequently purchase, I would never have bought anyway. So speaking strictly for myself, I see YT as a net benefit to the music industry. I suspect that's true for others as well, to a greater extent than the MAFIAA admits even to itself. Sure, the ease of copying and distributing digital content outside of 'official channels' has hurt the bottom line. But I think YouTube must be pretty far down the list of real, (as opposed to merely perceived), enemies of the music industry.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
There's also the fact that the artist that made the music you are listening to isn't being paid
When will the major labels start fairly compensating them?
Honestly, these greedy bastards at the major labels are major hypocrites as they screw-over artists at any and every chance they get and in multiple ways on multiple levels. They are the kings of dishonest dealing when it comes to compensating artists.
This "think of the artists!" line coming from the people who do the most to screw them over is nauseating.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
No trade body or associations like MPAA or RIAA, software developers and game developers, among all sorts of targets of piracy will ever acknowledge the marketing or spreading effect that piracy had over digital history, ever. It's a given.
Sony will never say Playstation 2 piracy helped a whole bunch to make the console spread out over the world, Microsoft will never acknowledge how much piracy had a hand in spreading out products like Office or Windows, Adobe will never say how much pirated copies of Photoshop and whatnot helped make it a standard, production studios will never say that series like Game of Thrones only had a reach in several parts of the world because of piracy, the industry in general will never admit that piracy had a huge role in making content be known in entire countries where the vast majority of people cannot afford to pay for content.
I'm not saying everyone should pirate stuff, I'm not saying it's a fair practice, and I'm not saying anyone is entitled to use/watch stuff without paying for it. But honestly? I constantly use YouTube to find information and check for content that I fully intend to pay for, including music, but also movies, software and games. Including music that is not available in my country, so I had to import, and I gladly did. This would not be possible without websites like YouTube.
It's incredibly easy to see how much this whinning makes no sense at all. Since the beginning of major piracy distribution systems these trade bodies and associations have been crying, whinning and being general assholes about how piracy was going to destroy x industry and whatnot. This has been completely disproven. We had very steady and substantial growth in ALL industries "victim" or piracy. ALL. Movies have been selling more than ever, tv series have been selling more than ever, softwares, games, music. Is it because piracy ceased to exist or somehow got eliminated? Nope. Is it because the industry stopped with it's backwards way of thinking by themselves? Nope. It's because piracy helped lauch several of those in countries that would not have access otherwiser, and because piracy forced stale, greedy and backwards thinking industries to come up with ways of matching the most attractive thing piracy has to offer: convenience.
So yeah, IFPI can go suck a cock. Keep thinking you can go back to the days of selling CD market up 2000% production costs and putting music on TV and Radio only, I'll gladly skip your crap and pay for content from musicians who knows those times have ended.
YouTube for Android has had this option for quite a while. It can only play when the app is open, play in the background all the time, or only play in the background when headphones are attached. iOS doesn't support this?
NewPipe can play YouTube videos in the background.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It's like a lottery ticket for them. They get promotion from the record companies, but that doesn't guarantee they'll make more money than by waiting tables or making lattes. They only make money by touring and merchandise.
I haven't pirated a single piece of music since I started using Spotify. I even pay now to keep the ads at bay...
How about Google does the simple experiment of ceasing to host any streaming music of the major labels and they can report back exactly how much better they're doing! If they want to put their money where their mouth is?
It's a loan, it's not profitable for the artist, but rather the label. The label gives a recording artist a sum for recording, promotion, travel and etc... The label retains the rights to the tracks and takes the majority of the revenue from record sales while the artist is free to tour and distribute merchandise to generate their own revenue. These agreements Cary from label to label and artist to artist but the architecture is generally similar with some exceptions. With the increasingly common practice of self-promotion/production the big labels are losing clientele on both side of the fence and are getting exceedingly defensive as a product.
Since moving to a shared-office environment I spend a lot of time wearing headphones and streaming stuff on YouTube. The new bands I'm introduced to that I like I head over to their Bandcamp page and buy the digital download. Most of them are are under $10 bucks and I think going through Bandcamp puts more of that into the bands pocket.
They're not getting paid by the record companies either; record sales haven't been profitable for artists for ages due to the way record company contracts work. The only way for artists to get paid is to go on tour; it's been like this for quite some time.
That's not universally true. It depends heavily on genre and on level of success. Multi-platinum pop artists make a lot of money on royalties (even in the era of streaming and digital sales, though not as much as they used to) and for them touring serves primarily to pump up their sales, not to generate income. Many of them lose money on touring, because they put on such extravagant, expensive shows.
For most other genres, it's the other way around, as you said. Their royalties often don't recoup their advances, thanks to clever and one-sided contracts, so they see music sales as a way to boost interest in their tours, and they make all of their real money on the road, often mostly from merchandise.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The first thing most people think of, if you mention RIAA and MPAA, is that they are evil.
But the second and more important thing that you'll think of, is that they are insane and are working as hard as they can, to DESTROY what they claim they want to protect. The RIAA is the music industry's #1 enemy.
When the wife or I start itchin' for some new music to play on the back patio, I get on Youtube and look for bands (or followup albums) similar to what we've enjoyed. I have to hear them first. Then it turns into 5-8 albums ordered from Amazon and/or bandcamp. (As CDs, really.)
If you stop Youtube, I will find other ways to research, but they won't be as convenient so I won't do them quite as often. These anti-Youtube so-called-representatives of the music industry are directly trying to reduce their own revenue. It's amazingly crazy. What's crazier is that the people doing it, don't get fired. Whoever is paying them, is spending money to try to lose money.
If I were in the music biz and had any leverage, I'd try to get these people fired, since their efforts, if they succeed, would reduce my bottom line.
(MPAA has similar problems going on. It works differently, but the strategy is the same: if their lobbyists/advocates win, their revenues will go down. They are actively trying to destroy their own business by finding ways to prevent sales from happening.)