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Music videos to return to YouTube UK
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 3 September 2009
It’s probably good news for the music industry and the songwriting community, and it’s certainly good news for YouTube, but it’s not good news for me. Organisations reaching amicable agreements is no fun to write about at all, where are the bitchy fallouts? And we never had the PRS v Google fist fight I’m pretty sure we were promised at some point.
Anyway, so called premium music videos will be slowly reappearing on the UK-version of Google-owned video flim flam YouTube this week after the web firm reached a deal with British songwriting royalty collection society PRS For Music.
As you’ll all surely remember, YouTube pulled all premium music videos off it’s UK website back in March accusing the collecting society of being unreasonable in its royalty demands for on-demand streaming services. PRS subsequently slashed their streaming royalty fees, though insiders said YouTube felt rates were still too high, while some of the publishers the collecting society represents seemed to think they’d gone too low.
Specifics of the new deal between the video service and the PRS aren’t known, though it seems Google will pay the collecting society a lump sum for a licence that runs from January this year through to 2012. Presumably that means YouTube won’t have to pay a per-stream royalty for the next three years.
This is interesting because I was under the impression that PRS was keen to move away from such lump-sum-based blanket licence arrangements, though big cash-rich digital service providers obviously prefer them, because it makes it easier to budget content expenditure, and reduces the risk of the service becoming a victim of its own success – ie they reach record audiences, but without an immediate increase in ad revenues, meaning content costs rise but ad revenues remain the same.
