Deal Reached to Allow Music Videos to Be Shown Again
YouTube UK has put the plug back in on music videos on the streaming service, after brokering a deal with the PRS for Music group, meaning full official videos, rather than dodgy radio recordings thwacked up there by teens, will return. Huzzah! Read on for the full info.
Cast your mind back to earlier this year when YouTube unceremeniously stopped streaming thousands of music videos online from popular music acts after a clash about royalties due. For a long time it appeared as if that really was it, but YouTube has been hard at work striving to get them back amongt the prat falls and keyboard playing cats.
According to the BBC, YouTube is paying a sum of money to PRS covering January 2009 all the way through until 2012, although how much it’s coughing up remains to be known. Still, the PRS now says that it and YouTube can “be friends again”, so expect plenty of Calvin Harris videos and no takedowns for some time to come.
Google, owner of the video-sharing website, has signed a deal with PRS for Music, which collects royalties for songwriters and composers for music played in Britain.
A previous licensing agreement expired in December, and YouTube tried to put pressure on PRS by removing music videos from the site.
Although PRS had offered the website a choice between paying 0.22p per song played or 8 per cent of its UK music turnover, it is understood that the new deal is a one-off lump sum. Neither party would reveal the figure, but it is thought to run to tens of millions of pounds.
The new agreement is backdated to January and runs until June 2012. It covers not only official music videos, but also user-generated content and music played in the background of television shows uploaded to the site.
Andrew Shaw, managing director of broadcast and online at PRS for Music, said: “It is important that those who are creating music the writers and composers we represent be rewarded when their works are used.”