Youtube - New Copyright Policy Could See Artist Revenue Drop by 9%

Youtube have just announced some changes to its manual copyright claiming process which could effect the way that rights holders and Youtube Creators claim and deal with monetizing videos.

For the content creator on Youtube, it could be good news, especially if you use other people's music in short bursts in your videos - now its going to be harder for manual claims on short snippets to be made by the copyright holders and more importantly to claim all the revenue from any video (Youtube has yet to define "short"). Digital Content ID matching will still work.

The assessment according to https://pex.com, is that this could see artists who regularly make revenue from these short snippets see their revenue drop by almost 10%.
While the example they quote is for Ariana Grande, and could mean significant chunks of change for a lot of musicians and songwriters. Obviously not everyone is on that scale, but yet another creeping devaluation of music is what appears to be happening here.

"This YouTube policy change seems aimed at dissuading rights holders from worrying about "short" snippet usage of rights protected material, yet YouTube has not even defined what constitutes "short." Seems like another overstep of authority on YouTube's part.'

pex.com  have  a unique fingerprinting tech that allows them to track snippets of video and audio as short as .5 seconds, which, as you can imagine, allows them to service artists and companies interested in both tracking the spread of their content and monitoring rights management.

See the full Youtube announcement here.

See what pex do here.

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