YouTube recently commissioned a study to prove that its service offers more value to the music industry than rightsholders have claimed.
Your starter for ten: does industry veteran Irving Azoff agree with its findings? Nope.
“My report about the ‘Value of YouTube to the Music Industry’ would be really brief because I can summarise the benefit of YouTube to artists in a word: none,” Azoff told Hits Daily Double.
“They say without YouTube, users would look for sites that paid even less for music. I say good luck finding services that benefit so greatly from music and pay so little… They’d rather spend their money on dishonest studies to justify their measly payments than offer creators what they deserve for the use of their work.”
These views aren’t surprising: Azoff has been one of the fiercest critics of YouTube within the industry. He called for YouTube to take inspiration from Spotify and Apple Music.
“If YouTube had the same level of commitment, their subscription service would be more than a head fake—and they’d be working hard, like Spotify does, to convert users to the paid tier for unlimited music,” he said. “Maybe Google should do a study on that.”
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