YouTube has announced it will pull music videos from the video sharing site in the UK, after negotiations with a royalty collection group turned nasty. Read on for the lowdown.
YouTube UK will begin taking “premium music videos” offline in the next few days, after it was unable to reach a new licensing agreement with the Performing Rights Society for Music.
According to Patrick Walker, director of video partnerships at YouTube in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the fall out occurred because PRS for Music was demanding YouTube “pay many, many times more for our licence than before…under PRS’s proposed terms we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback.”
The move means that any official music video posted on YouTube by a record label – or later claimed by one – will be taken down, marking the end of free promotion on the site for music acts. We reckon it’s an extremely shortsighted approach by music companies, many of which use YouTube to host videos which are then embedded into artists’ own MySpace pages (Lily Allen, anyone?).
YouTube says negotiations are still ongoing, but in the meantime, we’re off to listen to Spotify instead.
Out Now | £free | YouTube
