LOS ANGELES -- YouTube wants the music industry to know it plays fair.
A growing backlash from record labels and artists over music streams payouts prompted a column in The Guardian on Thursday by Christophe Muller, YouTube's head of international music partnerships.
Muller says YouTube was surprised that the labels and artists -- with whom the platform has partnered for years -- "suggest that YouTube has allowed a flood of 'unlicensed' music on to its platform, depriving artists of revenue."
"The truth is that YouTube takes copyright management extremely seriously and we work to ensure rightsholders make money no matter who uploads their music."
"No other platform gives as much money back to creators – big and small – across all kinds of content."
YouTube, he argued, has become a place for thousands of labels and rightholders to leave up fan videos and earn money from them.
For example, "a funny video of a Ben Affleck interview helped propel Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence to the Top 10 Hot Rock Songs chart 50 years after it was released."
Fan-uploaded content (like the above video) now accounts for about 50% of the music industry’s revenue from YouTube, Muller added.
Muller also wanted to assert that YouTube is not Spotify, nor any other streaming service out there.
"The next claim we hear is that we underpay compared to subscription services such as Spotify. But that argument confuses two different services: music subscriptions that cost £10 [$14.61] a month versus ad-supported music videos. It’s like comparing what a [taxi] driver earns from fares to what they earn showing ads in their taxi."
While music is not the most popular genre on the platform -- the average YouTube user spends just one hour watching music on YouTube a month -- Muller said the company still feels it is "core to YouTube."
"That’s why we worked with labels to build and implement Content ID. It’s why we created a model that offers promotion that pays – to date, we have paid out more than $3bn to the music industry and that number is growing significantly year-on-year. And it’s why we created a custom YouTube Music app and recently introduced YouTube Red, our own subscription service, so we could drive even more revenue to musicians and songwriters."
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