Photo: WENN
YouTube executive, Christopher Muller, has hit back at claims the company mistreats musicians.
Artists such as Debbie Harry and Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx have called out for the multi-billion dollar company to fairly compensate its musicians. However, Muller argued that “no other platform gives as much money back to creators.”
Harry, Blondie’s vocalist, claims, “The official video for Blondie’s Heart of Glass on YouTube has been viewed 49m times. There are over a million other Blondie videos on YouTube, most of them from unofficial accounts, garnering a combined hundreds of millions of views. Yet none of us in Blondie will receive a fair amount of royalties from these millions of plays. In fact, it is estimated by the American Association of Independent Music that YouTube pays only a sixth of what Apple and Spotify pay artists.”
This argument in particular mirrors that of Taylor Swift’s, when she held back her album from streaming service Apple Music, due to the fact that “Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months” of free trial period for Apple customers. Both Swift and Harry argued that they are not in fact arguing for the sake of themselves, both with a pretty comfortable living, but for the new generation of musicians who haven’t yet had their break.
After noting how “shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company” she, in fact, won her case – Apple now pays artists if their music is streamed during the free trial period.
In the case of the YouTube controversy, Muller states that the latest claim “we hear is that we underpay compared to subscription services such as Spotify. But that argument confuses two different services: music subscriptions that cost £10 a month versus ad-supported music videos.” He expands on his argument by declaring “It’s like comparing what a black cab driver earns from fares to what they earn showing ads in their taxi.”
