If they don't do, people will upload the full albums and people will listen to those copies. So better put there their songs.
Also, YouTube is a monopoly. It's the Microsoft Windows of online media distribution. Developers cannot afford to not release their software for Windows, now imagine if Microsoft decided to build an AppStore like iOS where they decided unilaterally the price of software and their cut, and it were dirty cheap! Damned if you didn't develop for Windows, damned if you did.
> If they don't do, people will upload the full albums and people will listen to those copies. So better put there their songs.
And the world's smallest violin will play a royalty-free sad song for them.
YouTube already has a huge pile of mechanisms above and beyond the DMCA to automatically identify and take down content. If you don't want your music anywhere on YouTube, you can use those tools, which YouTube doesn't have to provide at all, but which they provide because they want to make business deals with major labels.
Personally, I'd love to see YouTube just drop all access to those tools for anyone not on their platform, and labels can go back to filing individual DMCA requests by registered letter.
Let's run with the Windows analogy for the moment.
Microsoft did make an iOS-like Windows Store with a standardized cut, though they did let developers have control over pricing. And they bundled it with Windows 8, gave Windows Store apps access to new APIs and generally pushed it as hard as they could. It hasn't gone anywhere (at least not so far).
So let's say YouTube has Windows-like market power. Just like Microsoft, they still don't get everything they want. The other side of the table (artists or developers) has market power too - they own the rights to their music or apps. There's nothing stopping them from putting their official presence somewhere else (Facebook, Amazon, Vimeo, ...) and issuing takedowns for everything that shows up on YouTube. That they don't do this is a pretty strong indication that the deal they're getting isn't actually that bad (especially since YouTube's competitors would happily given artists all sorts of incentives to switch to help build their user base).
Also, YouTube is a monopoly. It's the Microsoft Windows of online media distribution. Developers cannot afford to not release their software for Windows, now imagine if Microsoft decided to build an AppStore like iOS where they decided unilaterally the price of software and their cut, and it were dirty cheap! Damned if you didn't develop for Windows, damned if you did.