Now YouTube pulls music videos in Germany
Google has announced that it’s pulling music videos from the German YouTube site, following the expiry of its licensing deal with local collecting society GEMA. And the web giant is so angry about the rates it claims GEMA wants to charge, it’s made them public.
Specifically, Google’s Patrick Walker tells Der Spiegel that “It’s unprecedented in the history of music video streaming”, saying that while PRS for Music charges £0.0022 per stream in the UK, GEMA’s on-demand music rate is €0.12 (£0.11) for every song up to five minutes, and more for longer tracks or those with ads.
GEMA disagrees, saying it offered YouTube a rate of €0.01 per track, but that Google was unwilling to give it enough transparency in return – chief executive Harald Heker describes it as a “fundamental clash”. We’ll say. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Musicians Union and the Featured Artists Coalition have both released statements today in support of PRS for Music’s position.
This one will run and run. Meanwhile, labels and artists who were using YouTube for promotion are going elsewhere – witness Kasabian’s use of Vimeo to release the video for their comeback single yesterday.
Tags: GEMA, Google, prs for music, youtube
April 2nd, 2009 at 9:01 am
I can’t imagine this strengthens Google’s position. I’m very interested in what kind of transparency GEMA were asking for – it seems impossible to properly account to all artists and copyright holders without a great deal more transparency from video sharing sites. Steve Lawson has proposed a very workable solution for this issue in his blog
http://www.stevelawson.net/wordpress/2009/03/youtube-vs-the-prs-a-very-20-solution/