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YouTube Music Head Says Company Pays Higher Royalties Than Spotify in US (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Making a living from streaming royalties is tough for music artists, and YouTube has had one of the worst reputations in the music industry for a while. Even Lyor Cohen, the current head of YouTube Music, knows that many are skeptical about the service's ability to pay out a legitimate rate. Cohen wrote a blog post this week to explain why he thinks that YouTube deserves another chance, and that his company is the highest paying music streaming service out there. The former road manager for Run DMC has been at YouTube for eight months now. He believes that YouTube music got to the subscription party late, which allowed companies like Spotify, Pandora and Apple Music to take an early lead. He also says that ads in music videos aren't the "death of the music industry," but rather a second supplement to bring in the money. Cohen claims that YouTube's ads brought in more than a billion dollars in the past 12 months. That should help soothe the music industry itself, but what about artists? Cohen rebuts the common belief that YouTube pays less than Spotify or Pandora, saying that his service pays more than $3 per thousand streams in the US, "more than other ad supported services."
To Pay The Man, Man!
You can't get paid if you're white. Or male.
saying that his service pays more than $3 per thousand streams in the US
I'd be happy to pay $3 to watch a 1000 youtube music video's. Compared to spotify: $10 would require me to listen to about 3300 songs each month totaling about 200 hours of listening time. I do listen spotify a lot, but not that much. I also watch youtube a lot, but not that much. $10 would would cover an entire year of watching youtube ad-free for me.
So somewhere between the costs - and we now know what it costs, $3 per 1000 streams, and the subscription fees, is enough margin for $profit.
it stinks of whataboutism - don't try to make Spotify out as a bad service, they are not, and have never been, neither to users nor artists.
Playing higher royalties than Spotify isn't really something to be bragging about.
This has always been about paying the record labels. You know, for all that reproduction and distribution work they do.