{"id":55747,"date":"2016-04-01T12:00:54","date_gmt":"2016-04-01T17:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whisnews21.com\/?p=55747"},"modified":"2016-04-01T12:00:54","modified_gmt":"2016-04-01T17:00:54","slug":"youtube-extorts-artists-pockets-profits-says-musicfirst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/2016\/04\/01\/youtube-extorts-artists-pockets-profits-says-musicfirst\/","title":{"rendered":"YouTube Extorts Artists Pockets Profits Say MusicFirst"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"youtube.face_\"Google\u2019s YouTube Extorts Artists And Pockets The Profits<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Guest post by\u00a0Ted Kalo, Executive Director\u00a0of the musicFIRST Coalition<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"6a00d83451b36c69e201bb08bb87f2970d-150wi\"Although its\u00a0shell company Alphabet is raking in massive amounts of revenue, and YouTube is the most popular music service in world, Ted Kalo of the musicFIRST Coalition looks at how he says\u00a0Google has been able to\u00a0exploit legal loopholes\u00a0to avoid paying\u00a0creators\u00a0the\u00a0money they deserve.\u00a0Guest post by\u00a0Ted Kalo, Executive Director\u00a0of the musicFIRST Coalition<\/a>\u00a0About $21,329,000,000 in revenue during Q4 and 558,000,000 copyright takedown requests in 2015.\u00a0Those enormous numbers are Google\u2019s record profit and record disregard for creators\u2019 rights.In February, Alphabet\u200a\u2014\u200aGoogle\u2019s newly formed shell company\u200a\u2014\u200areported that it earned $21.33 billion in revenue during the final quarter of 2015, making it the most valuable company in the world. Advertising accounted for virtually all of this revenue haul, up 17% over last year\u2019s results.\u00a0Its free YouTube video streaming service, with more than one billion users, is the most popular platform for music consumption in the world.<\/p>\n

\"1-yRWdm77ODDrSag6TgvHkLQ\"<\/a>Though Google does not disclose sales numbers for YouTube specifically, it ascribes its substantial growth in part to advertising dollars on YouTube: \u201cOur very strong revenue growth in Q4 reflects the vibrancy of our business, driven by mobile search as well as YouTube and programmatic advertising, all areas in which we\u2019ve been investing for many years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"notube\"The New York Times estimates the service makes between $4 and $8 billion annually.\u00a0And this cash cow is powered largely by music. The top 10 most watched videos on YouTube are all music related.Yet even as Google\/Alphabet continues to build its empire on a foundation of music, it pays the musicians and record companies whose music undergirds its massive success and growth next to nothing. According to RIAA numbers just released this week, YouTube, in combination with other on-demand ad-supported services like Vevo and Spotify\u2019s free platform, only contributed 5.5% of all music revenues in 2015.As one music industry source recently said: \u201cYouTube boasting about its payments to the music industry is like Bernie Madoff boasting about paying dividends to his investors.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Google-Money\"<\/a>So how does that work? Basically, Google has figured out how to rip off artists through legal loopholes that were established for the company nearly twenty years ago, when it was only a fledgling search engine provider.First, it uses its massive size and control of the \u201cindispensable\u201d YouTube gateway to force music creators into accepting the lowest, below-market royalty rates in the business. Second, its search engines often prioritize unlicensed copies of songs, for which the creators of those original songs receive nothing. Meanwhile, Google receives massive amount of cash from the advertisers who feature their ads on top of said pirated results.What\u2019s that you say? \u201cThere ought to be a law to prevent all of this.\u201dWell, there is\u200a\u2014\u200abut Google and its lawyers have figured out how to exploit the outdated and obsolete \u201cDigital Millennium Copyright Act\u201d that was intended to stop abuse of creative works.The DMCA dates back to the year of Google\u2019s founding, when the Internet was a very different place. Uploading an unlicensed copy of a song took a long while, and downloading a song took minutes. The Internet moved at the speed of CompuServe and dial-up AOL. Also, there were limited places where unlicensed content could even go (remember GeoCities?), and few of those sites were accessible to non-expert users.It was thought at the time that musicians and copyright owners could survey the limited landscape of the infant World Wide Web and identify each unlicensed copy of a song. Musicians and copyright owners could then send a notice to the website-hosting company, identifying the unlicensed work and asking the company to take it down. Provided that the company was not actively involved in the unlicensed activity and promptly took down the unlicensed copy, the company would be held legally harmless.Key to this legal regime was that Internet Service Providers were considered \u201cpassive,\u201d internet-hosting companies, and not profiteering, ad-dollars guzzling mega-corporations.<\/p>\n

\"Calico-jack-rackhams-pirate-flag\"<\/a>Today, Google is far from \u201cpassive\u201d in the massive enterprise of illegally pirated music: YouTube clearly distributes and capitalizes from others\u2019 creative work. The company makes bank off the advertising it actively targets at specific users and layers atop illegal copies of music. Yet it still claims the \u201chear no evil, see no evil\u201d amnesty of the DMCA, which Congress intended only for \u201cpassive\u201d intermediaries.Thanks to Google hiding behind its legal exemption, the \u201cfire\u201d of pirated music online has only continued to rage. The old, faulty DMCA model\u200a\u2014\u200ain which creators were responsible for surveying the entire Internet and finding illegal copies of their works \u2013- has completely, but not surprisingly, broken down. Creators now send, at extraordinary expense, more than 65 million notices of infringement to Google a month, and a record 558 million notices in 2015 alone.It\u2019s an unconscionable \u201cValue Grab.\u201d Google turns a blind eye to piracy and reaps the rewards from ads surrounding unlicensed content. Meanwhile, it extracts below market value for the music it is willing to license. The crumbs creators receive from these shoddy licensing deals must then be spent on monitoring the web and sending millions of futile \u201ctakedown notices\u201d for websites that pop back up in a manner of seconds even when they get shut down.This \u201cValue Grab\u201d can only be fixed with meaningful legal reform. Laws from the age of \u201cAsk Jeeves\u201d must be updated for the Google\/YouTube goliath\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

more on that soon. –\u00a0Music Industry Forum<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here Are The Sad Stories as YouTube Appears to be Hijacking Your Video’s Copyright<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

Daniel Godar:<\/strong> I struggled with my music before on youtube. False copyright claims by a BOT and disputing those took a year so all the profit stayed with YT. I had tons of views on those before it got deleted. Only the small videos survived. Maybe there is a conspiracy theory but either way I said enough is enough and stopped uploading my own music. Until they don’t get their things together I wont upload anything creative because it’s not worth it, it gets flagged etc. Now my partnership consists of dumbed down lets plays and gaming highlights because those don’t get much flagged.<\/span><\/p>\n

Paul Ungar<\/strong> One of my clients was the sole songwriter of a song featured in a commercial video produced and released by a very successful longtime major kids TV show. The video had about 22 Million views on YouTube. His songwriter share of public performance royalties for this was about $7,500 – which comes out to about $0.0003 per view. Crazy, huh?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google\u2019s YouTube Extorts Artists And Pockets The Profits Guest post by\u00a0Ted Kalo, Executive Director\u00a0of the musicFIRST Coalition Although its\u00a0shell company Alphabet is raking in massive amounts of revenue, and YouTube is the most popular music service in world, Ted Kalo of the musicFIRST Coalition looks at how he says\u00a0Google has been able to\u00a0exploit legal loopholes\u00a0to avoid paying\u00a0creators\u00a0the\u00a0money they deserve.\u00a0Guest post by\u00a0Ted Kalo, Executive Director\u00a0of the musicFIRST Coalition\u00a0About $21,329,000,000 in revenue during Q4 and 558,000,000 copyright takedown requests in 2015.\u00a0Those enormous numbers are Google\u2019s record profit and record disregard for creators\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55751,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55747"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whisnews21.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}