YouTube signs groundbreaking music royalty deal
YouTube has secured an agreement with the UK societies that collect royalties for 50,000 composers, songwriters and publishers to legitimise the use of recorded music on Google’s popular video-sharing website.
The agreement to license 10m pieces of music to YouTube – in return for a flat fee which has not been disclosed – is the first of its kind, said Steve Porter, chief executive of the MCPS-PRS Alliance.
“This is the first fully formed agreement,” he said, although some US collecting societies had reached interim arrangements with YouTube.
The agreement marks another milestone in YouTube’s attempts to win over owners of media content, who have expressed alarm at the amount of material available on the site that is either pirated or that generates no revenue for the companies that created it.
YouTube is to pay a blanket fee to the MCPS-PRS Alliance, exactly as many radio and television broadcasters do, for music to be used in its partners’ professional sites and in amateurs’ videos. The alliance will decide about how to distribute the revenues to its members based on an estimate of what music has been played on the site.
Andrew Shaw, the alliance’s managing director for broadcast and online, said it would work with YouTube to implement technology to improve the monitoring of which pieces of music are played. While it was impossible to monitor the millions of videos available on the site, they would concentrate on the top 5 or 10 per cent that attract the highest audience, he said.
“The long-tail is not worth calculating,” he added.
Mr Porter said the high rates of internet access and online video usage in the UK were among the reasons that YouTube had struck the deal with MCPS-PRS first, but forecast that it could become a model for agreements in other territories. Composers and performers have been eager to gain revenues from new services such as YouTube, however small, to help compensate them for the income they have lost from declining CD sales.