YouTube's emerging strategy, to pay revenue on pirated music
Google Inc.’s YouTube has announced a deal with Wind-up Entertainment, an independent label, to pay it a share of revenue from advertising beside pages carrying video with Wind-up’s songs in the background.
It is notable because it provides a glimpse at YouTube’s emerging strategy for compensating record labels, many of them pissed off at YouTube’s slowness to arrive at a solution for stopping piracy. Many users upload vidoes with copyrighted music playing the background. Now that Google can identify the songs with signature technology (yet to be fully announced), even the songs are pirated, this appears to be a workable resolution.
A copy of the announcement is here.
The deal covers more than 225 songs. Wind-up’s artists include Evanescence, Seether, Finger Eleven and Scott Stapp. The exact revenue share was undisclosed, so it is difficult to know how smart a deal this was for Wind-up.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
