Pete Waterman: “I’ve earned £11 from Rickrolling vid on YouTube”
We enjoyed reading the comment piece in Saturday’s Sun newspaper by music mogul Pete Waterman, who weighed into the YouTube / PRS for music debate firmly in the latter’s corner. Even if when we sat down with a calculator, we were puzzled about the maths behind his argument.
He talks about Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, which Waterman co-wrote, as an example. “That song must have been played more than 100million times on YouTube. It has become one big advertising campaign for the site. And last year, they paid me £11 for that! That’s crazy.”
£11 from 100 million plays? Let’s dig into it. Establishing the 100 million figure is hard, since the video has been uploaded to YouTube in several different versions. The official version on Astley’s own channel has only been watched 1.8 million times, but this unofficial one’s been watched more than 18 million times, while this one has racked up 15.8 million views.
So 100 million is a number plucked out of the air by Waterman – it’s more likely to be around the 50 million mark. Assuming it’s the latter – and that all of those plays had been counted in PRS for Music’s collection process – if Waterman received an £11 cheque, that equates to around 0.000022p per stream.
We’re guessing that YouTube’s deal with PRS for Music can’t be that low, given that the JOL used by PRS for other online services involves per-stream fees of 0.22p. Of course, as a co-writer Waterman wouldn’t get the full payment from YouTube, but still – what’s going on with his figures?
He might have a very small share of the writing credits on Never Gonna Give You Up. Perhaps he’s just getting a cheque for the official version, which would mean more like 0.00061p per stream. Maybe by ‘last year’ he means the payment he received last year (i.e. for 2007,when rickrolling wasn’t big). And there may be other factors at work – his share of the co-writing credits may be very low.
Or, of course, that £11 for 100 million YouTube plays’ claim is a load of old rubbish that simply makes a good headline in a tabloid newspaper. Place your bets now! Or if you have insight onto how we should tweak our calculations to make more sense, post a comment.
Tags: never gonna give you up, pete waterman, PRS, rick astley, rickrolling, youtube
March 17th, 2009 at 4:04 am
Poor old Pete Waterman, I’m sure he doesnt need the money. But, as a member of the PRS, I can confirm Peter Waterman does have a point, YouTube pays peanuts, it is in fact actually 0.00001GBP per UK stream, and only if you get over 10,000 UK visits!
March 17th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
This is an awful lot of speculation….
March 19th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Firstly, I can’t stand Pete Waterman, hes a big part of what is wrong with the UK music industry, and I long for the day when he retires and stops ramming his cheesy, manufactured pop artists down our throats. Whether his figures are off or not though, he still has a point.
Youtube make a massive profit off of copyright infringement and it isn’t right for them to pocket all the funds from that. Granted, Pete may not need the cash personally, but there are many other artists out there who do. Its high time Youtube were regulated for their blatant disregard for laws. Besides, it isn’t like they cant afford to pay people what they deserve, they earn BILLIONS every year.
Theres simply no excuse for this.
April 15th, 2009 at 11:16 pm
the man is deranged.
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=715&doc_id=175123&
google loses 1.65 million every day on youtube. thats more than half a billion money sink per year on a site. advertising does not pay for the bandwidth and maintenance of the site. so effectively, google is subsidizing free advertising for mr watermans work.
waterman should pay google to be frank. an entire generation that would have never known who astley was now knows. i’m sure he got a few sales out of that regardless of how many others were just annoyed.
the idea that youtube is a massive profit through copyright infringement is ridiculous, you only can say such things if you didn’t even bother to check the basic facts. whats true is mr waterman is a millionaire about 60 times over. he made his money before “downloading” and such cut into the business, so don’t cry for him.
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:14 am
I’m getting fed up of people putting youtube down. It’s idiots like Gary Lee McKinney that iritate the s**t outta me. I am a songwriter and I’ve never made any nmoney from my songs. And please don’t bitch about “what is wrong with UK music” Whjat exactly is right then? The majority is shit actually. I don’t care for most of it and haven’t since the late 80’s. Pete actually moaned that artists like Duffy wouldn’t get royalties and Duffy already defended illegal downloads saying that they were a positive thing. From that comment we can safely assume that she’s done alright from record sales. Pete needs to shut up and stop bitching too.
January 8th, 2010 at 9:55 pm
If Youtube loses money then that is their fault for being dumb?
Pete was (still is) a God in the music industry and did lots for the UK music industry. Get a brain “wrong says Fred”.
Alice, I bet your the type who gets those “Consolidate Loans” phone calls and takes them on as you need the help!