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Irving Azoff “too angry” to speak to YouTube
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 17 February 2016
Remember when veteran manager and one-time Live Nation chief Irving Azoff launched his performing rights organisation Global Music Rights, vowing to increase royalties by 30% for songwriters who joined him? Then he went out for YouTube’s blood? Well, that was all quite a while ago now. Well over a year. Let’s check in and see how it’s going.
“When I started GMR, I was looking for a business opportunity that could better somebody’s plight, and performing rights were the most outrageous and egregious of bad treatment to the creative community”, he explained to the New York Times in a new interview. “Every year I was sitting here looking at statements on major writers that were going down, down, down at a time when consumption of music was going up, up up”.
Yes, but how is that whole thing going with YouTube? “YouTube is an ongoing negotiation”, he admitted. “But I’ve stepped out of it and allowed my team to handle it themselves because I’m too angry”.
I would say that means it’s not going as well as he’d hoped.
