1. Removes windowing, unless you give youtube offers within reason (but what reason?). (Part 4/3b)
2. Google forces you to offer them comparable offers.
3. Parts of the contract are Illegal in many countries.
4. Prevents future sales through multiple means.
Major Paragraph:
“Catalogue Commitment and Monetization. It is understood that as of the Effective Date and throughout the Term, Provider’s entire catalogue of Provider Sound Recordings and Provider Music Videos (including Provider Music Videos delivered via a third party) will be available for the Premium and Free Services for use in connection with each type of Relevant Content, (excluding AudioSwap Recordings, which will be at Provider’s option) and set to a default policy of Monetize for both the Premium and Free Services, except as otherwise set forth in this Agreement. Further, Provider will provide Google with the same Provider Sound Recordings and Provider Music Videos on the same day as it provides such content to any other similarly situated partners. The foregoing will be subject to reasonable quantity of limited-time exclusive promotional offers (in each case, with a single third party partner) (“Limited Exclusives”), as long as a) Provider provides Google with comparable exclusive promotional offers and b) the quantity and duration of such Limited Exclusives do not frustrate the intent of this Agreement.”
Meaning:
YouTube not only forces artists to make their entire catalogs available on its free service however, it also demands that it happens on release day, online AND off-line.
This prevents future sales — i.e. YouTube users can now download all songs for free, which means there’s no need for anybody to buy music from iTunes anymore.
Side notes:
3. Rate Change. To the extent that any major label agrees to any rates for the Google Services that are lower than the rates set forth in Exhibits C or D, including with respect to bundling, Google will have the right to reduce Provider’s analogous rates accordingly, following thirty (30) days written notice (via email will be sufficient) to Provider.
Also, check below for some more in-depth links that convert to laymans more.
"YouTube users can now download all songs for free, which means there’s no need for anybody to buy music from iTunes anymore"
More like: Users can pay for a service that allows them to cache songs for offline playback in their YouTube app. It's not free and it's not like users are downloading the MP3s.
It's easy to download any youtube as mp3 - try googling for it, there are multiple services that offer that for free. Anything on Youtube is basically free as mp3.
That's not the point swombat is trying to make. You can easily rip a Youtube clip into MP3, or just download the video for later playing. I even have an app on my iPhone, McTube, that allows me to do exactly that. YouView on Mac gives you the same option. I used these apps to cache my youtube subscription overnight, as I have unlimited internet after midnight, but otherwise I am limited to 15gigs/mo.
The point is, you can't just as easily rip content from Spotify, Pendora, or any of the other streaming services.
I can always play a song and record it. YouTube doesn't even allow downloading in 1080p anymore.
Enough with this idiotic copyright bullshit. If you don't want people to copy your stuff, stop publishing it! We don't need copyright. Why is the law enforcement that I pay for with my tax money working to prevent alice from copying something bob put out in public?
Now if bob took alice's secret documents, and put them out for the world to see I can understand. However, this copyright mess is out of control. Please... Let's put an end to this nonsense.
The same thing exists for basically all the music streaming services, at least the ones that are in a browser.
Edit: And in fact, this whole thread is kind of a red herring. We already had this same conversation about DRM, and it turned out people did indeed go to paid services when it's easy to use them. It turns out many millions of people will pay to stream music, even when there are many ways to get music for free for a little more effort.
Same thing here. As far as I've heard, it's for offline listening, not download and have a file forever. The file will probably live in your youtube app and it will require breaking into it to get the music for free. I'm sure there will quickly be programs to do that, but most people won't care.
Want to add an anecdote here. Even though there are multiple options to get free songs, I still renew my Nokia Mixradio (earlier Nokia Music) every quarter. It feels good to be a legitimate user and the convenience is welcome(if only mixradio+ with 320kbps downloads starts working, things would be perfect). So, if YouTube offers a similar well priced service, I would happily pay, regardless of if there was a free way to get that mp3/4. Dirt for Safari Books.
I don't know why it makes you feel good to support the recording industry in any way. You're not a legitimate user of the artists, you're a legitimate user of the recording industry, which is a bunch of evil bastards who live off the backs of the artists without contributing all that much. It should make you feel terrible that 95 cents out of every dollar you contribute goes to support this: http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ (15 years old and still on the ball).
Every penny you contribute to these criminal assholes is hurting the artists you love. The sooner the recording industry goes bankrupt, the sooner we can move on to something better.
I strongly recommend youtube-dl. It's a small command line utility that will do the ripping for you, at adjustable (default max) quality and won't try to show you ads, send you spam mail, or put annoying stuff in the file metadata. It just works like
No it doesn't. It says right there in what you quoted that it doesn't.
> "The foregoing will be subject to reasonable quantity of limited-time exclusive promotional offers (in each case, with a single third party partner) (“Limited Exclusives”), as long as a) Provider provides Google with comparable exclusive promotional offers and b) the quantity and duration of such Limited Exclusives do not frustrate the intent of this Agreement."
And AFAIK the common case of music labels is to license an entire catalog or not
Sure, but what it doesn't mean is that it "Removes windowing for artists", as was claimed.
One problem with this whole discussion is that we have no previous contract to compare to. It's possible these are all new conditions or it's possible these are exactly the same clauses except with the subscription service mentioned.
Edit: In fact, here's the iTunes similar clause:
> "Except for a special circumstance, such as an exclusive, limited-time, one-off promotion for particular COMPANY Content, or for a reason beyond COMPANY’s control (e.g., a third party contractual restriction), or as otherwise agreed by the Parties, COMPANY (or a third party designated by COMPANY in writing and approved by ITUNES) shall commence delivery of all existing COMPANY Content as soon as reasonably possible following the Effective Date, and prospectively during the Term, for just cleared COMPANY Content and new releases, at least in time for ITUNES to begin selling eMasters the earlier of a general release date, provided by COMPANY, or when any other distributor is permitted to begin selling, or making commercially available, COMPANY Content in any format."[1]
essentially, absent exclusive one-off promotions, all the company's music has to be provided to iTunes, and new music has to be made available on the general release date or when other distributors can start selling it, whichever is earlier.
An interpretation in Europe I read suggested that the problem comes in when an indie artist wants to hold back streaming, which provides virtually no income in comparison to MP3 and CD sales. The agreement apparently suggests that artists must release to one or more streaming services at the same time as retail services.
IANAL though, and don't even understand the contract after reading it.
It wasn't meant to be nasty but the text quoted by the person to my mind actively contradicted his point. It stated that in very limited circumstances may "something" be done and was used as evidence that "something" wasn't controlled. I added the "and think about" part of my response when I reread and realised that the restrictiveness wasn't completely explicit although it was pretty clear. I really felt that the parent hadn't properly considered the meaning of what they had quoted.
Yeah, I'm a little mystified at how they get off demanding that labels make their entire catalog available. That seems like a contract of adhesion to me, in which one side leverages an enormous economic differential to impose unconscionable terms on counterparties - if you want to put anything on YouTube in hopes of monetizing it, you must put everything you have on there.
I'm not expert on contract or antitrust law, but this seems like its sailing very close to the wind. I can see a consumer benefit argument for YouTube, but I can equally see an argument that it's just an incumbent entrenchment strategy designed to keep content providers locked in, a poison pill that prevents them entering into an exclusive arrangement with any other distributor.
Illegal is good because the courts can do something with that. Courts in Europe maybe not so much though. The antitrust case against Microsoft took five years, and even after that Microsoft "forgot" to include browser options with Windows for, I think it was another year. For an indie artist relying on music sales for bread and butter and paying the rent that's a virtual death sentence.
Well, the "entire catalogue" refers only to the content on YouTube (not all the music the Provider has ever created, IIUC), if you look at the definition of "Provider Sound Recordings" and "Provider Music Videos" in Exhibit A.
I hope this doesn't happen. With Google weakly policing illegal content, labels really do have a bad situation here.
They either take the deal Google has given them which is bad, or say no, and risk getting removed from YouTube and having their music uploaded by fans as lower quality streams. In other words, they take less money, or possibly lose everything while paying huge fees to send YouTube take down notices.
This is bad for the consumer in my opinion. I want indie musicians and labels to be able to make more money, not less. This further incentives musicians to look for another path of work.
Its disappointing that while technology is making it easier than ever to record and produce music, its becoming tougher and tougher to make a living off it.
I don't see how that follows, except for the terrible logic of less profit for the musician is automatically bad for the consumer because people will just stop making music if they can't get rich off it.
It looks like they're fighting back against exclusives and bullshit restrictions like "you can stream the first 5 songs, but if you want more you have to buy the album for $14.99", just the sort of thing everybody was complaining about two weeks ago when amazon launched their streaming service.
I understand that musicians like money. I can empathize with that, i like money too. But trying to frame it as good for the consumer is silly.
> except for the terrible logic of less profit for the musician is automatically bad for the consumer because people will just stop making music if they can't get rich off it.
It's not terrible logic, it's fundamentally sound. It's just not absolute.
That is, people won't "just stop" across the board. But the harder we make it to make money from making music itself, the more time would-be music makers will have to spend finding some other way to make money to finance their life.
So you lose music at the margins, particularly music that requires a higher level of investment to produce, particularly from those who have less disposable time/money.
I don't agree with that. I like artists, not businessmen. Turning artists into businessmen, or simply making businessmen don the apparel of an artist is not "good for the consumer", it's not "fundamentally sound" either.
but plenty of musicians manage to become rich (often becoming not-indie musicians in the process). There's lots of musicians, they can't all be successful. A musicians failure to become rich should not be taken as a sign that youtube should give them more money, it should be taken as a sign that their music don't have a broad enough appeal to make them rich.
Are people expected to feel sympathy for these companies? Have we forgotten that people turned to big centralized services for their music as a direct result of the recording industry's aggressive effort to kill P2P? This situation was created by the labels' own actions, their failure to embrace the Internet early on before these kinds services existed.
"Its disappointing that while technology is making it easier than ever to record and produce music, its becoming tougher and tougher to make a living off it."
It did not have to be that way. We could have set things up so that when a song was downloaded, the artist and recording studio that produced it received a small payment automatically. It could have been a truly innovative revenue stream.
> Have we forgotten that people turned to big centralized services for their music as a direct result of the recording industry's aggressive effort to kill P2P?
We are talking about small independent labels.
> This situation was created by the labels' own actions
> Its disappointing that while technology is making it easier than ever to record and produce music, its becoming tougher and tougher to make a living off it.
That's normal. Market commoditization. The problem is musician and labels don't want to change and they are learning the hard way.
I'd be interesting to see how many people live off music in the last century.
I don't really know what "change" they are supposed to be dealing with. Sure digital makes it easy to copy and distribute, but musicians keep making less and less and it is harder for them to actually use music as a career. Is the change you are referring to, that they basically should just deal with being broke, because it is easy to pirate? That sounds like a bad thing to me, not good.
> Sure digital makes it easy to copy and distribute, but musicians keep making less and less and it is harder for them to actually use music as a career.
This is true of every single profession that involves creating digital media. Writing, journalism, video, film, game dev, photography, you name it. The money is falling out.
I think a large part of the problem is that in all of those fields, people love what they do. Of course, they work very hard at it too, but what that means is that there are a large number of people producing media for the sheer joy of it.
As the cost of production goes down, an increasing number of "amateurs" can create media, and as distribution costs drop, that media is more easily disseminated. The end result is that people willing to do stuff for free are crowding out the paid players.
There are some exceptions, of course, creative people who make a ton of money, but they're the narrow end of the power curve. For an increasing number of people, being creative isn't a lucrative gig.
I don't believe that's a good or bad thing, just a thing. What I do think is bad is when people who make great creative works don't have the time or opportunity to do that. It's a waste if a talented musician has to spend 40 hours a week at some lame job to pay their bills and only has a few hours for music on the side.
But that's not a problem with the music not paying the bills as much as it is with the bills themselves. If we lived in some sort of utopia where we all the essentials we needed to get by for free, then there'd be no reason to whine about artists not getting paid. They wouldn't need to.
> I think a large part of the problem is that in all of those fields, people love what they do.
Also, the absolute amount of good content keeps going up. Those old Louis Armstrong albums aren't going away. People still listen to the Beatles and the Stones. And this is true of nearly all varieties of content.
The only timely content (sports, news, contest shows) is partially immune to this, but even then, attention is scarce and more quality entertainment enters the public domain every year. Right now it's mostly (classic!) books, but decades in the future, HD content will be 100% free to use and distribute and the bottom will really fall out of everything.
This is really insightful and not something I'd realized even though, for example, my own reading and music tastes encompass an increasingly long timespan.
> they basically should just deal with being broke
If they aren't willing to compete in new ways and change their business models, yes.
Even television shows have this problem. Commercial revenues are down, so production costs go down (more reality TV) and the format of advertising has adapted (more GM cars featured prominently).
And then half the Internet complains when their favourite actually good show gets cancelled because the TV execs saw its viewing figures tumble below acceptable ad revenue levels in some graveyard slot while this month's major sporting event was on.
We are inevitably reaping the consequences of what freeloaders have been sowing for some years now. It still costs a lot up front to make good quality content, more than ever as we push the envelope in some media like the big name games and movies. If too many people just take it for free with whatever excuse instead of doing something that ultimately supports all the artists and other creative professionals who make these works, then those people are going to have to find other jobs to do to pay the rent, and our culture is left poorer for it.
This is exactly why HBO keeps their Game of Thrones content which costs $6 million / episode exclusive.
If they started selling episodes for $1.99/each in HD the day after they air they'd see their upfront capital they get from their recurring subscriptions evaporate, and the show would also go away.
The irony is that Game of Thrones is big and successful enough that it probably could make a tidy profit even in the alternative model you mentioned and despite being one of the most pirated shows in the world.
The difficulty with the "adapt or die" reasoning isn't GoT, it's shows 2-10 on the popularity chart, where show 2 has only a fraction of the audience and brings in only a fraction of the revenue but its fans still want the same production values.
In the same way business does it - offer different services. There are two extra problem with this business though. Labels were stubborn to change, but I think finally they accept the fact that content is commodity. Secondly, musicians are artists not business people. There is an ethos of a poor artists that devotes live to sacrum.
Absolutely! I gave us a real warm and fuzzy feeling inside making more money with cheap, mediocre quality tshirts made in Thailand with unknown working conditions, than the actual music …
Ironically, in the time of the sacred internet, cutting a limited edition on Vinyl is still more profitable than any other digital form for a lot of small artists :)
I'm not complaining though, because I refuse to look at art as plain business and rather earn nothing at all than compromise doing what i love for a better ROI.
I think people should value money less. The artists/label on one hand, and the people who are too greedy to spend a few bucks on something every once in a while, because they can get it for free on the other.
Update: And i do believe that the current time is probably the best ever to make music, from a purely artistic viewpoint.
Kind of sucks, when someone is telling you: Offer different and additional services, and spend more of your time doing it to make up for the fact that your content is now easily able to be pirated.
LOL what world do you live in where music is a commodity? A market treats commodities as equal with no regard to who produced them. This has 0 to do with music, because it's all about skill, star power and charisma, so...
The music industry is changing so fast. I feel sorry for the industry, despite their bad karma.
Illegal digital downloads disrupted everything, and cut profits substantially. Luckily, Apple and Steve Jobs showed up and offered a brief reprieve. But now, just a 10 years into paid digital downloads, when the new revenue is still a tiny fraction of the old revenue, the field is disrupted again by streaming. And as with previous disruptions, it appears revenue will again be cut dramatically.
I'm not sure what the takeaway is. Maybe the importance of owning your distribution channels?
"Illegal digital downloads disrupted everything, and cut profits substantially"
Only because a decade beforehand the RIAA decided that instead of working on ways to monetize the Internet, they would work on ways to make computers less useful for music distribution. Basically the recording industry's shortsightedness and failure to embrace the greatest communications revolution since the printing press led to everything else you described.
To put it another way, the RIAA could have pushed for Congress to set up a micropayments system for music downloading, before most people even knew about music downloading. Instead they lobbied for the DMCA and spent their money developing DRM schemes that failed before they were ever deployed. Their "bad karma" is a result of their response to the complete failure of those efforts: abuse of the legal system on a massive scale.
> I'm not sure what the takeaway is. Maybe the importance of owning your distribution channels?
Supply of all types of media content is way up. There are only so many hours in the day, so demand is comparatively inelastic. This means per-unit cost has to go way down.
This is the general trend for pretty much all media, including things normally categorized as something else, like news and stage productions.
On the plus side, distribution is basically free and gatekeepers are losing their monopolies and monopsonies, so creators and consumers of niche products can connect better than ever.
Unless you're a twelve-year-old showing off your Minecraft mods or your new styling tips. Then you're getting non-monetary value (friends, fun, reputation) from creating content, and you're unintentionally competing for the attention of kids and tweens that used to buy comic books and Backstreet Boys albums.
You said 'creators and consumers of niche products' which implies commercial intent to me, and we are having this discussion in the context of music publishing. You're not wrong, but I think this is a loss of focus.
Hardly. Commercial content has been challenged and displaced by non-commercial, purely cultural content like never before. Young people would rather see a goofy image macro that their friend made than some lame sitcom by old white guys in Hollywood. For the first time ever, this non-commercial content lives side by side with commercial content on massively popular portal sites like Faceebook, reddit, and YouTube.
That's not the point. This is a thread about a particular set of contract provisions YouTube is apparently offering to publishers, not a general shift in consumption patterns.
Every year, the average household spends proportional more money on entertainment than the year before. If you only look at one part the market, the conclusion will be equal incorrect. First it was radio, the cassette tape, VHS, P2P, streaming, ectra ...), and each time someone proclaimed this was going to doom the "industry".
The music industry could argue that illegal music is pushing purchases to the movies, and the cinema could argue that illegal movies is pushing purchases to music services. Why should anyone believe either claim when the total profits from entertainment is going up?
just because more is spent by households doesn't mean profits have gone up. Maybe companies have to spend more to sell their products now (which might seem silly but I'm pretty sure advertising is one thing which _hasn't_ gotten cheaper in most cases).
I have no concrete facts, but my intuition tells me that commodity CD-Rs played as big a role. I think that whole line about illegal downloads is industry propaganda. You never hear about how illegally burned CDs brought down the industry, when everybody I know was ripping CDs from each other for a period of years. Why? Because record labels' parent companies were the ones selling CD burners hand over fist.
You know I don't. And I know you don't either. Unless we can run a study whereby some portion of the population is entered into a control group and doesn't have access to the internet, it'll remain a question about interpreting data and not of fact.
So your statement was just a guess, just checking. I don't know the data from the record companies because I wouldn't bother reading it for fear of bias, I just know that a lot of the 'anti piracy' groups never actually put money back into the music industry, its just more money to fund more lawsuits.
That's a dangerous stance in general, probably better to listen to both sides whilst acknowledging that they are both likely to be biased in their own favour.
I'm actually happy about this. It will boost YouTube competition, which is sorely needed.
Indie music may not show up on Google's metrics as being all that important, but it's a gateway drug of sorts. The internal data analysis is probably missing that.
Some other video site will pick this up (Vimeo is so primed for it) and pick up a lot of viewers in the process.
There's no guarantee of that. Several other sites may offer more favorable terms, but if they don't have a fraction of the viewers that YouTube has then those terms will still be worth less than a shitty deal with YouTube. The laws of supply and demand are obvious under perfect competition, but network effects massively change that calculus.
You underestimate the advantages of incumbency. YouTube is arguably the lowest common denominator in terms of quality (eg most Filmmakers prefer Vimeo because it gives more control over quality levels), but that hasn't stopped it being #1 by a mile. Getting a critical mass of people to shift to another platform is pretty hard.
I think I'm at least partially on YouTube because of YouTube rather than the content. I pretty much only watch videos on my phone, and it the only video app that I have, and it's good enough.
Independent artists need to stop being independent and form up into groups that collectively have a large audience and then higher a lawyer to represent them, its the only smaller bands can have any leverage with streaming services. This is arguably the only reason for "record labels" to still exist.
The big problem that the artists are having is the fact that YouTube basically is aggregating illegal content.
So, even if you want to start your own service, you are competing against the illegal copies on YouTube.
What's worse is that, technically, I'm not even sure how you do anything about this.
You could remove YouTube's safe harbor (which, to be fair, they really shouldn't have since they are monetizing the content), but I still don't see how YouTube would then police this.
What's going to happen to all those existing videos which currently generate views? Discovery is important; personally I have stumbled into quite a few videos with a fair amount of "views" which led me to follow a band. If they take those those down according to this new contract, I can see why the smaller labels may be disadvantaged since they won't have the money to promote their videos.
Isn't this just about monetizing the videos? So they could still have videos there for promotion, but they won't get money (without directing the viewer to wherever they are selling their music at).
There were only a couple of people discussing that, and only a handful of comments. Most of the discussion seemed to be about how terrible the terms were and whether there were any alternatives to YouTube.
Which is enough to understand what's all the fuss about and why all those pages should make one "surprised". Blog post itself doesn't have any description. Doh.
Up until now, yes, in that it concerns something not yet released. YT is working on releasing a streaming media service, on terms that are still emerging/being defined. From the looks of this document, the terms will not be pretty for non-major labels. YT gets a lot of reproduction rights and the ability to manipulate prices, which has a very high potential for exploitation of artists.
This contract is probably behind an NDA and releasing it may also break other confidentiality agreements already in existence.
The summary is that these terms are very unfavorable according to the indie artists and the companies they are affiliated with. They feel they are being strong-armed by Google and that Google is showing a strong preference toward large media companies and making it very difficult for future indie artists to become successful with this agreement.
Yes it would be like getting a sane take on copyright policy from TorrentFreak.com
The labels and Google were negotiating, the whole reason it went public was their shitty terms compared to major labels. No one said there wasn't negotiations taking place.
Can you enlighten us what is so disgusting about this in your opinion, this seems to be a straight forward agreement to use the content provided to Google. Not worse than any other EULA I've read.
That article seems entirely based on the comments on the OP. The only major quote in there is from a comment by the publisher of the post.
And it's wrong about its two major points, as other commenters pointed out: the contract doesn't limit "windowing", and the "covenant not to sue" just covers suing over copyright infringement for exactly what's covered in the contract itself.
Quite as usual, you should expect them back away from this deal and soften it a lot in case it gets massive public attention and criticism. They have competitors, and those will not fail to use this moment.
Key Points
1. Removes windowing, unless you give youtube offers within reason (but what reason?). (Part 4/3b)
2. Google forces you to offer them comparable offers.
3. Parts of the contract are Illegal in many countries.
4. Prevents future sales through multiple means.
Major Paragraph:
“Catalogue Commitment and Monetization. It is understood that as of the Effective Date and throughout the Term, Provider’s entire catalogue of Provider Sound Recordings and Provider Music Videos (including Provider Music Videos delivered via a third party) will be available for the Premium and Free Services for use in connection with each type of Relevant Content, (excluding AudioSwap Recordings, which will be at Provider’s option) and set to a default policy of Monetize for both the Premium and Free Services, except as otherwise set forth in this Agreement. Further, Provider will provide Google with the same Provider Sound Recordings and Provider Music Videos on the same day as it provides such content to any other similarly situated partners. The foregoing will be subject to reasonable quantity of limited-time exclusive promotional offers (in each case, with a single third party partner) (“Limited Exclusives”), as long as a) Provider provides Google with comparable exclusive promotional offers and b) the quantity and duration of such Limited Exclusives do not frustrate the intent of this Agreement.”
Meaning:
YouTube not only forces artists to make their entire catalogs available on its free service however, it also demands that it happens on release day, online AND off-line.
This prevents future sales — i.e. YouTube users can now download all songs for free, which means there’s no need for anybody to buy music from iTunes anymore.
Side notes:
3. Rate Change. To the extent that any major label agrees to any rates for the Google Services that are lower than the rates set forth in Exhibits C or D, including with respect to bundling, Google will have the right to reduce Provider’s analogous rates accordingly, following thirty (30) days written notice (via email will be sufficient) to Provider.
Also, check below for some more in-depth links that convert to laymans more.