This is less a trend and more a flood now. AdRev is the latest company to launch a service aiming to help indie labels and musicians make more money from YouTube.
It’s called ContentID.com, and promises to pay customers 100% of the revenues earned from their own videos on YouTube, and 80% on the claimed revenues from other people’s videos using their music. The company is touting its YouTube Certified status and ability to upload SoundCloud audio as among its advantages over competitors.
YouTube monetisation for music is becoming a crowded space in 2013. Established firms like INDMusic have been joined by Audiam, ONErpm and now AdRev in recent weeks, and as Kudos Records‘ Danny Ryan politely pointed out to us earlier this week, many traditional distributors have been offering similar services to their label customers for some time now.
In those cases, YouTube becomes just another streaming service to distribute to, albeit with its own unique features. There’s even already some prime beef in this sector, with ONErpm CEO Emmanuel Zunz has published a lengthy attack on Audiam’s business in an op-ed piece for Digital Music News.
In it, he claims that “there is nothing revolutionary about what Audiam does… no amount of finger pointing and name calling will conceal what will become evident soon enough as you continue to read below, his service offering is inferior to what already exists out there.”
Cue more finger pointing and name calling, of course. Audiam’s founders have responded in the comments section (“You don’t understand our business or YouTube correctly… You can’t possibly be this ignorant about how claims work. But it’s certainly a scary thing to lash out and invent accusations…”)
Our takeaway: any label or artist wanting to make more money on YouTube is best advised to sidestep the arguments, dig deeper than headline revenue-share figures, and go with the people they trust to do the best job. Like any business transaction, really.
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I don’t get what all the vitriol is all about.
There’s money to be made on YouTube.
You, as the creator of content, have the right to collect that money.
If you, as the copyright owner, can’t be bothered or are too dumb to figure out how to do this, there are a growing number of services to collect that money on your behalf. Of course, they’re going to expect some kind of compensation for their services.
YouTube is on track to pull in 3.7 Billion in revenue in 2013. With that kind of money, I’d hardly call the pool “crowded” with support services helping independent content providers to collect money for their content.