Taylor Swift Puts Pressure on YouTube

 Once Apple decided to offer its new customers a 3-month trial of its streaming service, Taylor Swift withheld her music from the platform. After millions of her fans magnified her protest, Apple had to make a rapid and uncharacteristic U-turn. 

 Now Taylor Swift cooperates with other musicians to put pressure on YouTube, urging the service to ensure better protections against copyright infringement and better pay for artists. However, the industry observers believe that this time she’s unlikely to win.

180 artists, including Swift, have published an open letter protesting about the DMCA, which allegedly allowed major tech firms to grow and generate huge profits by facilitating piracy while “artists’ earnings continue to diminish”. This letter was intended to add weight to negotiations between record labels and YouTube parent company, Google, over music licensing. The artists complained that YouTube streams have grown massively while revenues have grown very little.

Indeed, YouTube revealed that its payments to copyright owners and artists last year totaled to $740m, which is an increase of only 11% from year before, despite total views for music videos growing 132%. Accordingly, effective per-stream rates halved.

In the meantime, on Spotify artists get paid a small amount per stream, even when Spotify makes a loss. Of course, record labels feel they are owed more money. The difference is that YouTube’s model is advertising-based – in other words, it doesn’t guarantee any income for labels. And it is clear that Google is extremely unlikely to emulate Spotify, as the latter paid a massive 84% of its total revenues back to the music industry last year. Such move would make YouTube a completely unsustainable business.

This is why artists complain against the DMCA, or more precisely the act’s “safe harbor” guidelines, according to which YouTube can’t be held responsible for the copyright infringement of its users. Record labels therefore have to police YouTube for infringing videos that are uploaded more quickly than they can issue takedown requests.

On the other hand, the recent research found out that the impact of “safe harbor” is very small, with just 1 of 50 views coming from unauthorized user-generated uploads. 75% of all music video views are official.

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