Is YouTube ruining or improving the music industry?
YouTube: Your source of music videos, fail compilations, cat videos and tutorials.
We all know how it goes when you ‘quickly’ want to watch a video on YouTube; you will find yourself sitting there hours later watching the most random videos.
The video hosting channel is used by many people to listen to music too.
I know I use it to listen to songs that I don’t have on my phone. Everything is there, including amazing recommendations.
As with everything, there is a dark side to this distributing giant.
Reports say that YouTube pays artists the least money per stream out of anyone, including iTunes and Spotify.
They pay artists .0005 of a cent per stream. Even if you have 1 billion views, you only make $5000.
Considering the music industry relies on this new age of streaming for revenue, this seems to be a really sub optimal deal.
Google to the defence
Tech colossus Google bought the company several years ago for a casual few billion. For a deal that was ridiculed, the investment panned out pretty well for Google.
Due to the criticism of the platform from the music industry, they launched their investigation into the matter of YouTube vs. Music industry and the highlights of the findings are:
– “in the absence of YouTube, most time spent listening to music on the channel would be lost or shifted to lower value music channels.”
– “in the absence of YouTube, time spent listening to pirated content would increase by 29%, suggesting that people are going to the channel instead of pirating music.”
-“blocking music from YouTube does not lead to an increase in streams on other platforms.”
The platform has had its own share of legal battles surrounding copyright infringement especially with Viacom, which the video hosting channel won.
If the platform could pay artists the same amount that iTunes and Spotify do, surely there would be no problem.
What are thoughts and what platform do you prefer for streaming?
