YouTube & PRS at Loggerheads
Spreading like wildfire through Twitter and the social web yesterday were rumours, then confirmation, that YouTube and the Performing Rights Society (PRS), who collect money on behalf of record labels and artists whenever their music is played, had fallen out over licensing negotiations.
The dispute further highlights how traditional national bodies are finding it increasingly difficult to operate in the global village of the Internet, which has had a particularly profound impact on the way we ‘consume’ music in the last decade. Understandably each of these regional organisations don’t want to miss out on their slice of the pie, but bizarrely seem intent on destroying the very thing they are trying to embrace engulf at every turn.
The move by GooTube perhaps seems like a fairly huge overreaction, possibly a move to ‘bully’ the PRS into compliance (well, you can have this much, or nothing at all!). But bullying or not, at the moment everyone is losing out.
To look at it from another angle, perhaps YouTube should be viewed more as a continuous on-demand advertising platform (and a highly targeted one at that), rather than a TV station. I don’t know exactly how the PRS collect royalties, but one would hope they wouldn’t be so stupid to collect royalties from an advert commissioned by a record label to promote a new album, for example.
The new ‘click to buy‘ feature introduced on YouTube at the end of January you would think the PRS would be embracing, as it surely must have had a positive impact on sales. Except of course that money goes direct to the artist/record label.
Of course, YouTube is but the most popular amongst the myriad of video sharing sites on the net, I suspect many of whom pay the PRS nothing. Perhaps their time would, in the short term, be better spent trying to negotiate deals with those sites. After all, it’s where the UK consumers they are trying to protect will soon be turning for their music videos.
More at:
- YouTube row: Will music fans lose out? - Radio 1 Newsbeat
- Google and PRS in deadlock as music videos pulled from YouTube - The Guardian
- YouTube stands by UK video block - BBC News, Technology
