Does YouTube Underpay Artists 13B a Year? | Hacker News Reader

Does YouTube Underpay Artists 13B a Year?

thetrichordist.com

11 pointsJerry28 comments

What a load of hyperbolic rubish. To suggest that Youtube is cheating the music industry out of at least 60% of its potential revenue, a figure a couple of billion less than Googles net revenue in 2015 is crazy talk. It is this type of logic that results in the billion dollar ipod: https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod/up-nex...

I am not saying that Google shouldn't pay more, I am not saying that Google says less. But do a quick sanity check before posting silly numbers in a blog post. Or better yet, provide solid evidence to back up your assertions.

Spotify with 160 million users in 2017 paid out at least 2.225 billion in royalties to rights holders (It’s probably a little higher). That’s around $13.90 user. YouTube provides the same service (except with video) and CEO Susan Wojcicki says YouTube has 1 Billion MUSIC users a month.

The article is completely wrong. The blog post referenced (1) says only that "more than one billion fans come to YouTube to be part of music culture and discover new songs and artists". This doesn't translate into YouTube Music having 1B MAUs, nor it translates in any way to Spotify users.

The article is just a piece of low quality rubbish:

This is Google: Second largest corporation on earth, manipulating children to protect one of the biggest corporate rip-offs in history. Disgusting

(1) https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2018/10/a-final-upda...

What do Spotify rates have to do with anything? Most YouTube users are not paid subscribers, or anywhere close.

And I imagine quite a bit of YouTube usage isn't for music.

On both Spotify and YouTube, every user brings revenue.

I'd amend that to "brings value."

At least on YouTube users with ad blockers, are still able to help understand "trends" and that helps keep engagement high by users who don't have ad blockers. Its still a valuable user even if they don't produce revenue directly.

Why doesn't Google just start buying the music companies. It would cause them less pain. At one point Google had enough cash laying around they basically could have bought the entire industry. The music industry has way too much clout for what they actually financially produce, and a chip on it's shoulder of how important it really is.

The article contains pretty much no evidence other than confusing a Spotify user with a Youtube "Music User" (which is never defined).

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

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