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Business News Digital
Zoe Keating reignites debate around YouTube’s Music Key negotiating tactics
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 26 January 2015
So “big bad Google” was the talking point once more in the music community on Friday after independent musician Zoe Keating posted a detailed blog post about her current quandary over YouTube, as the market-leading video platform ploughs on with its Music Key adventure.
It seems that the new subscription streaming service being piloted by YouTube – having finally placated most of the indie labels – is now hoovering up all the self-releasing artists that the Google platform is meant to be super proud about. And as with the indies, the deal on the table is basically “join in with Music Key or say goodbye to YouTube entirely”.
As with the indie label community last summer, Keating isn’t too impressed with this stance on YouTube’s part. Though, whereas you sensed that with the indies the biggest gripe was the royalties being offered by Music Key, which were below the market norm, Keating focuses more on the loss of control over her output that staying with YouTube requires.
Outlining the new YouTube deal as it was explained to her, she wrote:
1. All of my catalogue must be included in both the free and premium music service. Even if I don’t deliver all my music, because I’m a music partner, anything that a third party uploads with my info in the description will be automatically included in the music service too.
2. All songs will be set to “montetise”, meaning there will be ads on them.
3. I will be required to release new music on YouTube at the same time I release it anywhere else. So no more releasing to my core fans first on Bandcamp and then on iTunes.
4. All my catalogue must be uploaded at high resolution, according to Google’s standard which is currently 320 kbps.
5. The contract lasts for five years.
She then adds: “I can’t think of another streaming service that makes such demands. And if I don’t sign? My YouTube channel will be blocked and I will no longer be able to monetise (how I hate that word) third party videos through Content ID”.
Noting her previous life working in the tech start-up domain, Keating reckons that she’s no luddite when its comes to the digital revolution – indeed she has very much capitalised on the potential of online to stay in control of her output in a way that would not have been possible before the web – yet she reckons that the big tech companies remain out of kilter with the artistic community on some key issues. And that’s the problem here.
She reveals that she raised concerns about Music Key from the off, and initially the YouTube product team seemed interested in her opinions and called her in for a meeting. But, she writes, “the meeting was similar to one I had with DA Wallach of Spotify a couple years ago. Similar in that I got the sense that no matter how I explained my hands-on fan-supported anti-corporate niche thing, I was an alien to them. I don’t think they understood me at all”.
“The YouTube music service was introduced to me as a win-win and they don’t understand why I don’t see it that way. A lot of people in the music industry talk about Google as evil. I don’t think they are evil. I think they, like other tech companies, are just idealistic in a way that works best for them. I think this because I used to be one of them”.
“The people who work at Google, Facebook, etc can’t imagine how everything they make is not, like, totally awesome. If it’s not awesome for you it’s because you just don’t understand it yet and you’ll come around. They can’t imagine scenarios outside their reality and that is how they inadvertently unleash things like the algorithmic cruelty of Facebook’s yearly review (which showed me a picture I had posted after a doctor told me my husband had 6-8 weeks to live)”.
As with when the indie labels were at war with YouTube last summer, there remains some debate over what is meant by a channel on the Google site being “blocked”. YouTube says that music channels can remain on its platform without artists signing up to Music Key, they just can’t be part of the site’s revenue-earning schemes.
In an update to her original blog, Keating says that – according to the way it was explained to her – to achieve that she’d basically have to set up a new ‘non-music-partner’ channel and start from scratch. So it wouldn’t be as simple as pressing a button, disconnecting from Google’s revenue streams, and then carrying on running her existing channel but without compensation.
Quite what access Keating would then have to the Content-ID system isn’t entirely clear either. Content-ID, of course, monitors the YouTube platform for video uploads that use music belonging to third parties, alerting said third parties to the fact their content has been used in this way. Rights owners can then choose to block the video or to share in the ad revenue it generates.
For Keating, Content-ID is important because there are thousands of third-party videos using her music. YouTube have told her that if she doesn’t sign up to Music Key “the content that you uploaded will be blocked – but anything that we can scan and match from other users will be matched in content ID and you can track it, but won’t be able to participate in revenue sharing”. Which means she’ll either have to allow that music to be used without payment, or request it be blocked.
As for new compositions, presumably Keating – even if outside the Music Key system – will be able to pump those into Content-ID through her blocked partner channel, while making them available to her fans via her non-partner account.
It would be risky for YouTube to deprive non-participating artists of access to the tracking capabilities of Content-ID, given its link to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act safe-harbours which enabled the entire original YouTube business. Though this fix is messy enough to make it an undesirable solution for both independent artists and bigger rights owners.
Of course, if enough artists withdrew as music-partners but continued to use Content-ID to block third-party videos, it would screw up YouTube’s core user-generated content business. Though few artists would ever go that route, and as Keating notes, if she did this on her own “the usual people will talk about it for a day or two and then it and I will be forgotten”.
Which brings us back to where this debate started when the indies first cried foul last May. YouTube built its audience and business on the back of the artists who used its free video streaming platform as a marketing channel (aided by the aforementioned DMCA), and now it’s exploiting its market power to force the same artists into a draconian contract so it can pursue its subscription service ambitions. While all the time believing it is doing the artist community a big fat favour. Clever YouTube. Bad Google.
