YouTube may have to pay more for music in Europe

Video sites like YouTube and Dailymotion may be forced to pay more to musicians and record companies in Europe.

It is part of a draft proposal put forward by the European Commission to reform European copyright laws. These have not been radically overhauled since 2001 – long before the arrival of the likes of YouTube and Spotify.

The draft directive “aims to reinforce the position of right holders to negotiate and be remunerated for the online exploitation of their content.”

Under the plan, these sites must reveal to copyright holders what profits their works have generated.

They have to take tougher measures to prevent the illegal distribution of music and video content on their platforms. This would include adopting technology to automatically detect songs or videos, which rights holders have asked to be taken down.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) hailed the proposal as a “good first step” in addressing the “value gap” – the growing gap between the growing consumption of music and the disproportionately small revenues given to artists and songwriters and their investors – which it called “the most important issue facing the music sector in Europe and worldwide.”

Its CEO Frances Moore said that the proposal “confirms that user uploaded content services such as YouTube, which are the largest source of on-demand music, should not be able to operate outside normal licensing rules. However, there is a lot more to do to make this a workable proposal. We look forward to working on this in the coming months with the Parliament and Member States.”

The BPI, which represents the UK recorded music business, said the proposal acknowledged that a level played field was needed for digital music.

Its CEO Geoff Taylor said it was unfair that platforms such as YouTube are “building huge businesses using music and other content while paying only a fraction of the royalties paid to artists and labels by services such as Spotify and Apple Music”.

PRS for Music, which represents the rights of 120,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers in the UK, said it provided “legal clarity” that sites as YouTube must get a licence from rights holders. This was a sentiment echoed by independent association IMPALA.

But the European Consumer Organization (BEUC) argued: “This would punish millions of consumers who share a self-made remix of a song, family videos or holiday pictures which contains parts of a music tune or video clip.”

YouTube has responded that it would be better for the music industry to come into “partnerships” with it.

Launched on February 14, 2005, YouTube is the largest music platform and third most visited website in the world. Current figures show that it has 1.3 billion users. 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day. The total number of hours of video watched on it each month – 900 million.

While the Google-owned YouTube insists it helps breaks acts and has paid the music industry more than US$3 billion since 2007, it is targeted by the music industry for low payments. Earlier this year, over 1,000 artists, including Coldplay, Ed Sheeran and Lady Gaga, called on the European Commission to address the “value gap”.

However the proposal could take some years to come into effect. It has to go to the European Parliament and EU states for approval. In the meantime, expect heavy lobbying from the owners of these sites.

In what the European Newspaper Publishers’ Association hailed as a “significant and historic step”, news publishers will be regarded as rights holders for the first time. Which means the likes of Google News would have to pay newspaper publishers a fee if they use news snippets.