This massive music news story broke just after we had mailed out the latest edition of The Gen last month so allow us to now bring you up to speed with all of the developments.
On March 9th, massively prominent video streaming site YouTube made a shock announcement it would be pulling what it defined as all “premium music videos” from its UK platform because of a dispute with the publishing royalty collecting body, The PRS For Music
The decision seemed to be a result of YouTube and PRS attempting to renegotiate the video site’s license from the PRS, which is legally required if any site wants to legitimately feature any songs written by songwriters and owned or administrated by publishers represented by the Society. Obviously, this translates to meaning the vast majority of professional musicians and songwriters in the UK.
Essentially, PRS for Music were trying to increase the royalty fees it receives from YouTube (which is owned by Google). YouTube felt that the collecting society was being unreasonable and, as a result stopped showing all music videos in the UK.
In an official statement confirming their immediate plan to block all music videos, YouTube said:
“We value the creativity of musicians and songwriters and have worked hard with rights holders to generate significant online revenue for them and to respect copyright. But PRS is now asking us to pay many, many times more for our license than before. The costs are simply prohibitive for us - under PRS’s proposed terms we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback”.
PRS for music responded that they were outraged and disappointed that this drastic measure had been implemented in what they see to be the middle of negotiations. They launched a website specifically promoting their agenda: fairplayforcreators.com.
PRS argued that they were only asking for the fees as set out by the UK Copyright Tribunal when it last ruled on digital royalties, and stressed that they had not asked for any music to be removed whilst talks were ongoing, arguing that the move was an underhand negotiating tactic and a bid to force the collecting society into accepting lower rates.
This is the first major instance in the music video world in which a web platform have chosen to remove content from their site due a dispute with a collecting society.
The Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) weighed into the debate, commenting in a statement:
"We condemn Google's use of its near-monopoly to dictate terms to PRS For Music. We ask them to get their tanks off our lawn and to either accept the decision of the Copyright Tribunal or else negotiate a reasonable offer based on a transparent analysis of YouTube's advertising revenue income."
In a further twist this week, negotiations between YouTube and German collection society GEMA reportedly broke down in a similar fashion and YouTube have declared that they will now block access to music videos on their German web platforms.
Have your say: Do you primarily go on YouTube to watch music videos? Will this dispute be resolved? Could these tactics backfire on YouTube, leading to other service providers simply moving in soon to take their place? For many labels, YouTube is a large marketing tool and increasing source of revenue- how will they respond? What do songwriters think of this?
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