
The YouTube Contract for Indies - AndrewDucker
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2014/06/23/fk-heres-entire-youtube-contract-indies
======
nijiko
Transcription from comments on the site.

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.

~~~
cloudwalking
"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.

~~~
swombat
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.

~~~
hsod
Certainly such services exist, but I don't see the relevance to either the OP
or the post you replied directly to.

This is about an official service offered by Google/Youtube.

If there was a news story about a new video streaming service, would you reply
"all the movies are already on the Pirate Bay"?

~~~
x0054
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.

~~~
pooper
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.

~~~
sillysaurus3
_YouTube doesn 't even allow downloading in 1080p anymore._

Offtopic, but what do you mean YouTube doesn't "allow" downloading in 1080p?
If you can watch it in 1080p, you can download it in 1080p.

~~~
pooper
It might be possible, I don't know but it is definitely not convenient.

------
nickconfer
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.

~~~
notatoad
"This is bad for the consumer."

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.

~~~
namlem
Most indie musicians can scarcely eek out a middle class lifestyle. Only a
lucky few ever get rich off it.

~~~
crucialfelix
most indie musicians are WELL below middle class.

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
No that's not true.

~~~
crucialfelix
well given that most indie musicians have jobs that allow them to support
their music career, then I guess you are right.

but among professional full-time music only indie musicians - the majority are
below middle class. they do not own a home, they have debt.

a minority have achieved enough success to live a normal middle class
lifestyle.

------
nostromo
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?

~~~
humanrebar
> 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.

~~~
anigbrowl
Connecting with more people is only as good as your ability to monetize those
connections, though.

~~~
humanrebar
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

~~~
dublinben
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

------
rudimental
Could someone with better legal knowledge and familiarity with licensing help
me make sense of how I should react to this?

------
kmfrk
I guess this is exactly the kind of case where you'd have a chance to see
whether RapGenius is actually useful?

------
waterlesscloud
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Of course there's no guarantee.

But there's also no guarantee YouTube will retain its viewers.

The viewers are _only_ there for the content, not for YouTube.

If YouTube doesn't have the content, it won't have the viewers.

This is a market segment that can shift much more quickly than people
(including Google, apparently) imagine.

Content is still, and will always be, king.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

------
wavesounds
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.

------
bsder
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.

------
brisance
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.

~~~
kiiski
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).

------
aram
For anyone wondering what's all this about - check out the comments at the
bottom of that page.

~~~
raldi
The comments explain nothing.

~~~
aram
They give an idea of what's all that about without reading dozens of pages.

~~~
magicalist
It appears to be a bunch of industry people who think that Google doesn't
enforce the DMCA well enough...

~~~
didroe
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.

------
good-citizen
can someone explain? is this secret?

~~~
MangoDiesel
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.

~~~
good-citizen
if the author is reading this, please follow up here and let us know what
happens to you from a legal perspective for having violated the NDA.

------
hayksaakian
Has someone OCR'd this or made it searchable

~~~
kmfrk
If you install Naptha ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/project-
naptha/mol...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/project-
naptha/molncoemjfmpgdkbdlbjmhlcgniigdnf)), there's an experimental search
feature for images you can use.

------
presty
kinda reminds me of [http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2011/04/why-google-
should-...](http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2011/04/why-google-should-buy-
music-industry.html)

------
bryze
Is it time to break up tech monopolies? I think the writing is on the wall.

------
ivv
Can't Hulu or even Netflix offer labels a better deal?

------
cnst
All the more reasons for Baboom?

------
dbwat
A sane take on things, discusses some of the sticking details:
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140623/17084727661/more-...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140623/17084727661/more-
indie-labels-youtube-confusion-reigns.shtml)

It's worth noting that this is a negation process. This is Google's proposal
and the labels aren't even willing to negotiate:
[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/24/youtube-
mu...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/24/youtube-music-
contract-indie-labels)

Also the fact that someone leaked this is most likely part of the
negotiations.

~~~
IBM
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.

------
meandave
This is disgusting

~~~
dudus
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.

~~~
bitlord_219
Not so, say those in the know:
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/24/notice_and_shakedown...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/24/notice_and_shakedown_google_mafiastyle_contract_for_indie_music_revealed/)

~~~
inventor
If you want people to take you seriously, never cite The Register.

~~~
wutbrodo
And in particular, citing them as "in the know" (as hilarious as it may be to
do so).

