I’ve read a lot of Ari Herstand’s stuff on the music business and it was the obvious first thought.
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I think one of the biggest incentives to doing this kind of work is not mainly money or fame, but the simple fact they are working for themselves. To set your own schedule, not having to be a slave to the alarm clock at 5 AM every fucking day, not having work issues with your manager or his manager or coworkers, or customers, the stress of commuting through god damned traffic twice per day, yeah, I can see that as being an incentive.
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Yes, he’s making enough money to keep doing it and he obviously loves what he’s doing, plus he’s his own boss. He only answers to himself, yes he may need to consider his partners, but working with four others with the same set goals is much easier than working in a corporate or government structure with extremely limited outlets for stress and input.
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He’s using someone else’s content. Should they not get paid?
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That’s not the question. The question is what the revenue split should be. And that is a difficult question to automate, as has been noted above. Some lazy people just use the music with a graphic and add no value. Others, like this guy, add original content that should get a percentage of the ad revenue. What is a simple, equitable way to separate “no value” uses from "added value’ uses?
At the moment, Google’s system seems built to allow music publishers the right to “monetize” other people’s IP by taking most or all of the ad revenue, and that seems like going a bit too far.
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Very good point!
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Unless you are selling something or use patreon, fuck youtube. It’s not worth the effort.
Don’t care, I love him! 
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Spend less on music and also get a real job.
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At some point the videos would be what build his “brand” and gets the viewers to buy other stuff. The subscriptions, touring, etc are not supplementary, but part of the actual business plan.
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I think anything that is legal, not harmful, and pays minimum wage is legitimate.
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Interesting. Could covers be a way out of that condundrum? Instead of a fitness routine to, I dunno, “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor, you could do it to a cover of “Eye of the Tiger”?
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I mean you don’t have to use copyrighted music. There’s a whole library of royalty free music that YouTube provides. “But it’s not as good or recognizable” you say! Well then, who is monetizing who?
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The first time video I used royalty free Creative Commons music with attribution on YouTube I got an immediate copyright violation notice and an attempt to monitize my video that contained zero content by them. Some jerk used the CC licensed music in a video and then submitted their video to Content ID. So my initial experience with Content ID was one of attempted theft. I think taking all of a video’s ad revenue can be justified if it is just a cheat to play the song, but I also think that in other circumstances the revenue split should recognize the value of the video creator’s IP and not pretend it doesn’t exist.
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Well why the rant than?
The amount of indie music is a tiny fraction of the universe of all music.
The majority of music is “indie”. For every person that gets signed, there’s a 100 kids in their bedrooms with guitars or laptops. Finding indy music is also not very hard. Bandcamp has more indie music than you could poke a stick at. Reaching artists on Bandcamp is also usually trivial (i.e. click email address, write email, send).
There’s also a plethora of smaller record labels that aren’t asses and that will happily strike deals with people. After striking an initial deal, I’m pretty sure some smaller labels would like to find you-tubers with millions of followers they can direct new singles to.
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When I was considering putting together a YouTube channel a few years ago, I found plenty of royalty-free and public domain music (the two sites I remember right now are Incompetech and FreePD, but there are others.)
I put a lot of thought into what I wanted to do. I still have my notebook with pages devoted to what I’d need: plans to dress and light the “set”; what clothes and/or costumes to wear; props needed, preferably sourced from dollar stores; editing software, etc. I finally figured out that the time required to write, shoot, edit and promote my little one-woman-show would amount to a second job… time I didn’t have. So I abandoned the idea.
But, having plotted it out, I’ve got respect for the people who do manage to take their dreams and make them reality. They deserve to earn something from that. But the musicians who create music need to get their cut as well. YouTube’s broken system tends to work against both content producers and musicians.
Okay, maybe not a full-time job, but definitely a second job, especially until I managed to develop an efficient routine for production. So I changed the word for clarity’s sake.
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But the majority of easily discoverable music belongs to the labels, because hardly any of those 99% of unsigned musicians have the talent for self-promotion that would make a typical music consumer aware of their existence.
And again, the time involved in finding an unsigned artist whose music works for you is prohibitive. Especially if you want to have different music for each video you produce - which means the youtuber has to be endlessly searching for new indie music that they like and that would work as background for a video. Whereas if they use published music, all they have to do is scour through their MP3 library or keep hitting “related” on spotify until they find a good tune.
YouTube provides a library of royalty free music that won’t trip Content ID. Also, and more importantly, appeal any strikes you think are undue. That’s the only way the system gets better.
Music licensing has never worked that way. There are entire films that are unavailable due to uncleared tracks.
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Bandcamp makes it plenty easy to find good independant (or small label) music. It’s really not a difficult process (and I say this as someone that does it regularly for my own non-monetised podcasts). Search by genre see whats charting on the website, or read through the Bandcamp daily blogs and you’ll find a lot of good music pretty fast.
If you’ve got a million followers on youtube, find a smallish label or two putting out stuff you like; tell them you’ll help promote their releases in exchange for a cheap licensing deal to use it and pay a lesser fee and let them send you tracks.
Also independent doesn’t mean unpublished. There are plenty of independent artists uploading music to Spotify and the ilk.
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