YouTube Music Question

[russellnollen]

Say for example that an artist would like to use my music as background music for his/her slideshow gallery to be posted on YouTube (or anywhere else). How would that deal be done to your best recommendation? Would you do either exclusive rights for a fee or nonexclusive rights? How would you structure a royalty payment?
Thanks much!

[ComposerLDG]

Good question. I've never licensed anything for YouTube directly, but a couple of my songs appear on there that were licensed through Rumblefish. With them, the use of the music is non-exclusive.

Not sure if that helps or not.

Best,

-Loren

[Russell Landwehr]

Yeah, I'd go non-exclusive. I personally would probably be likely to charge a very minimal fee as a sync license depending on the popularity of the artist. Something like $20 if they are a starving artist. (Unless your music is highly sought after by people pounding down your door for stuff like this.) It's not a matter of under-valuing your music, but helping out a fellow artist... unless they are big like Van Gogh.. (I hear he can afford some massive sync fees for his personal YouTube videos )

Do some searching on the web about how YouTube perfomance royalties are tracked and paid. You will need to make sure your music is registered with your PRO with you being both Writer and Publisher. Beware of companies that want you to sign up and pay them to "make sure you get paid."

Russell Landwehr

[mojobone]

The question before us today, I'd probably answer the same as Russell, but a more interesting question is what we'd charge for a Youtube channel that's actually making decent money; there are only a few or a few dozen of those, at present, but the numbers are growing.

[andygabrys]

To expand on what my compadres have said:

YouTube follows two flavors these days

1) channels which are operated by people or brands who don't want to dilute their brand and have no ads running on the channel

2) channels which have elected to "monetize" their channel and have ads running, and therefore YouTube is earning ad revenue and you as a music creator can actually get "royalties".

I am not sure if case #1 will ever get you "royalties" even if Rumblefish or AdRev is collecting on your behalf.

Since in many ways music playing on YouTube is still the Wild West - really the only way to get reasonable income at this point is to charge a sync fee. If it's an artist who has a lot of followers then you might elect to go for low or no sync to be a good sport, but if it's any kind of commercial entity you are talking a totally different situation and your fee should be much higher accordingly. pm me if you want more specifics on a recent license I negotiated for a piece of my music.