Now this may be just my ignorance of how the music industry works showing, but bare with me.
I just watched a video which told me that Tom Waits employs sixty (60) or more people to search YouTube for channels that had uploaded videos using the sound tracks of any of his songs. When found, they immediately file a copyright claim and or a take down notice of the offending video. And he is not alone. For the vast majority of video creators, a copy lawsuit is a waist of time as there is no money there to recover.
Is it me or does this seem counter productive to anybody (everybody) else?
If you have ever looked into licensing a song through BMI, ASCAP, Marmoset, SESAC, SOCAN or any other media licensing company, you will have found the cost can run into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. There are a confusing medley of different licensees for variable circumstances. And the complex fee schedule varies as well, which obviously puts the music out of the reach of all but a few tip of the top YouTubers, who only want to share their favorite music.
With approximately 86000 new videos added per day and 60 people searching? I would say that your group are trying to stop an army of ants with a magnifying glass on a partly cloudy day. And I'm not suggesting let it all go free. After all, music has value. What I am suggesting is making it cheap and easy for video content makers to get a one time license for a video. It could go as easy as this.
Users create a social media account on, lets say, a special BMI website (this does not exist, its just an example). The account might contain the users personal information and contact info. Click on a new license form and fill it out, click pay and the site would spit out a one-use license in a PDF for print or email. The license contains the license number (an encoded version of the video description provided by the applicant) and the composer credit text that must appear in the video (end credits) and/or in any extended text description section available on the particular platform.
In order to make and keep this non-transferable social media license valid, the following information would be entered for registration: The date of application, the single upload web site (ie YouTube, Vemo, twitter, whatever), the account or channel name, the name of the video, the song you are licensing, if its the original track or a cover performance, your current follower/friend/subscriber count (more on this later), if your video will be monetized, and your expected publishing date. The License would permanently cover THAT one song on THAT video uploaded on THAT site on THAT channel. Additional uploads or songs would require their own license. IE one (1) song on one (1) video uploaded to YouTube and Twitter = 2 uploads = 2 licenses. Or five (5) songs on one (1) video on one (1) upload on YouTube = five (5) licenses.
License costs would be on a sliding scale (below based on one (1) song, one (1) video, one (1) upload);
$5.00 US - all non-monetized videos regardless of subscriber count.
$10.00 US - monetized video with less than 100,000 subscribers/followers
$25.00 US - monetized video with more than 100,000 subscribers/followers
Seems pretty cheap. But is it? YouTube alone gets about 80,000 hours of new uploads a day. According to Quora.com, the average length of a video on YouTube is less than 5 minutes. That comes out to about 86400 videos a day. If you low ball the figure and say only 10 percent of those bought a $5.00 license, that comes to $43,200 a day. That's per DAY and that only includes the $5.00, non-monetized, video license.
How much are your artists making on those uploads now? Oh, that's right your paying 60 people at 40 hours a week to police just YouTube. And I'm sure there are lawyer costs mixed up in there somewhere (there always are).
The cheap price is the key. Affordable by everyone. The license code makes checking against a database easy. The text credits make publicity for the music that is being paid for by the licensee, and its easy to check the video license validity. Now for a few bucks content creators can avoid video take downs, copyright strikes, all the bad stuff. Who wouldn't do that?
With proper announcements the site would be flooded with applicants. At the very least it would pay for its own operation, policing, and royalties. And since take downs don't make money, instead point creators to the licensing site where they could buy a license and get their video creation restored.
This is not an original idea. There are already sites on the internet that license music for uses like YouTube. But at $14-150 dollars a pop for unknown artists, their percentage of uses on videos is limited. To my thinking, the value here is volume. Getting a great rep and building that 10 percent to 40-50-60 percent licensed with a large and happy repeat user base.
So as I said at the start, I'm not a professional musician. I'm not an executive responsible for collecting royalties. I'm not paying 60 people a day to make me no money and spread animosity about my brand by doing take downs on YouTube. But even I would stop using free Creative Commons music in my videos if for five or ten bucks each a I could use popular music.
Be Well.
