Performing Rights Society Force YouTube to Remove All Music Videos for the UK
There has been a lot of talk overnight about YouTube (owned by Google) not being able to come to a royalty deal with the PRS in UK, thus leading to all music videos being removed from YouTube effective immediately. Here are links to the statement about the situation from YouTube and the PRS.
I don’t want to just run through what many other sites and news sources are writing about, I wanted to discuss why a solution didn’t happen and what is going to happen next to both the PRS and YouTube.
YouTube and the PRS couldn’t come to a royalty deal mainly because the PRS were asking for a lot and they were providing no real information in return. The PRS were asking for blanked royalties but weren’t able to specifically say what artists would receive the royalties and what amounts they would receive. YouTube stated the following:
“PRS is now asking us to pay many, many times more for our license than before…we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback. In addition, PRS is unwilling to tell us what songs are included in the license they can provide so that we can identify those works…that’s like asking a consumer to buy an unmarked CD without knowing what musicians are on it.”
It is kind of like the PRS just expected YouTube to meet their demands no matter what they asked. In addition, on the PRS statement for some reason they mentioned Google’s last quarter revenues for 2008 in which have completely no relevance in this case. The PRS still seem to be using old methods to try to force companies into agreements that just simply aren’t realistic in this current economic climate. Remember that Pandora is not in the UK anymore because the PRS couldn’t offer them a decent agreement and forced them to basically close up shop in this country.
This leads me to believe that there is now a potential for YouTube to launch a spinoff site as already reported with all four major labels, which will attract high levels of advertisers and also possibly sidestep old music companies like the PRS.
2 Comments
Your information is incorrect!
The PRS have not asked anyone to remove videos.
Google have refused to pay royalties to the PRS.
They say the license for royalties is too expensive.
The PRS were the first “Performing rights society” in the world to collect YouTube royalties.