The Performing Rights Society (PRS) collects royalties for music artists, and it generally does a good job. Except when it pushed YouTube to the limit a couple of months ago and got music videos booted off the online video site. But things now look set to change for the better, and about time too.
Stuck In The Past
The music industry has not shown its best side in trying to evolve to include new digital forms of media. Instead of encouraging the fledging businesses, it has chosen to stamp on them. Its reward for such a heavy-handed and short-term approach? Piracy increasing in popularity year-on-year.
What’s truly bizarre is that it never seems to learn from its mistakes. After stifling rather than using Napster and those early file-sharing services, the music industry is now continuing to make the same basic errors. And this is even extending to the world of music videos.
Music Videos On YouTube
Music videos are an extremely important and popular part of the online video sector. They are amongst the most-viewed videos on YouTube and so popular as a genre that YouTube is behind a spin-off site set up purely to host music videos. There’s just one problem – the record labels and organizations that collect royalties for artists have to be on board.
YouTube has had its run-ins with record labels in the past, with the most recent incident seeing Warners removing all its videos from the site. But in early March YouTube had a run-in with a new foe – the PRS, which claimed the artists it represents deserved more pay-per-play than the Google site was willing to cough up.
The PRS Sees Sense
The row, which saw the PRS claiming Google could afford to pay up and Google claiming it was unwilling to agree to the new rates because it would lose money every time someone played a video, ended with YouTube blocking the viewing of music videos in the UK. And the situation has yet to be resolved.
Today saw the PRS unveil its new streaming royalty rates – which will also affect digital radio stations such as Pandora and digital music services such as We7 – as part of an Online Music License. According to BBC News, from July 1, 2009 the rates for each time a track is played will fall from the current 0.22p to just 0.085p. These rates are set in stone for the next three years.
Conclusions
Hopefully this will mean YouTube and the PRS can begin negotiating again about a deal to ensure music videos are available to watch in the UK. The current situation of geo-blocking isn’t doing either side any good. And with VEVO shaping up, a deal would be very timely at this stage.
Looking at the bigger picture, this lowering of streaming rates is a huge step forward for the music industry because it shows it may finally be ready to embrace rather than curtail digital music options. Something many of us have been calling for it to do for many years now.
