Indie licensing agency Merlin has been conspicuously silent amid the recent storm about YouTube’s licensing negotiation tactics with independents – unsurprising, given that it remains at the negotiating table, with all the NDAs that come with that. However, CEO Charles Caldas has been speaking generally about how YouTube’s existing rates for music sit within the wider marketplace, in an interview conducted by Music Ally’s Eamonn Forde for Phonofile. “The dynamic of YouTube as a promotional platform is something I totally get – people use it and it has enormous reach and is very powerful. At the same time, I don’t think people consider that it is a monetised service and it is paying, from our experience, less than the streaming platforms are,” he says. “YouTube can be fantastic at exposing your artists but experience shows it is not as good at generating revenue around that. YouTube pays – per-stream and per-user – less than any of the subscription services. What I don’t get is that people are happy to criticise and attack the paid streaming platforms who are paying at the top end of the scale and yet seem to be willing to monetise YouTube at a much, much lower level.”
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Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…