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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

> Is Google seriously removing that monetization option unless the rights holder agrees to release ALL their music through Google, and on Google's terms?

Yes, the independent artists have been screaming about YouTube licensing terms for a while now.

> Because that's what Zoe's post is implying, and that would be some serious next level anti-trust bullying kind of nonsense.

But there's competition. You know ... Vimeo, NicoNico, etc.

That fact that they have less than .1% of the market in the US isn't relevant. </sarcasm>

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iTunes, Google Music, Soundcloud, Spotify, etc. are all competitors in this situation. YouTube is a LOT less than 99.9% of the music distribution market.

And yet whenever any of the 15-30 year olds I know want a specific piece of music, they go straight to YouTube. I have yet to see anybody push "Buy" on any of those services

"The average iTunes user spends ~$40 per year on the service"

That matches my experience, and that's average. Presumably the in-app purchase whales are skewing that high; it's probably closer to $20.

Between apps and video, that doesn't leave much for music. Almost all the money goes to Top 40 for that.

You need to meet more 15-30 year olds. I'm part of that demographic, and many of my friends view Spotify as the first stop and Youtube as a backup if Spotify doesn't have the desired content

And some have all 320s, and a surprising number are buying mostly vinyl. But everyone uses YouTube to listen to tracks they don't own, aren't available to stream (many, for Spotify), or are vinyl-only. It's always the go-to for house parties.

There's a lot of variety out there, but you're right, YouTube is the backstop.

Yes, lots of people use YouTube. But bsder claimed that everyone in that demographic that they know goes "straight" to YouTube, and I was presenting the countering anecdote that I know loads of people in that demographic who use YouTube as the backstop, not the first stop.

On the house party subject, my roommates and I in college through roughly weekly parties, ranging from a few people to several hundred people, and we defaulted to Spotify (but used lots of other things as well). We could have definitely been an outlier, though, as I agree lots of people default to YouTube there.

My 14 yr old listens to music on youtube about 3 hours a day while doing homework (yes, he has 3 hours of homework, but that's another question).

Very occasionally he'll listen to the music I have on my home server.

Never any of the other free services.

So, I'd agree with the GP, but the demo is much younger than 15-30.

Wow, surprised to read that statistic. I spend that per month, and that's on a light month.

Are you arguing that YouTube holds a monopoly over music distribution? Because if not I'm not sure what the point of this anecdote is.

Of those, YouTube has the lowest barrier to entry for users. I'd guess because of that low barrier to entry that YouTube serves the most music traffic, but I don't have any stats to back up that guess.

YouTube is such a popular resource for music that someone has taken to making a Chrome extension based around playing music from YouTube. https://streamus.com/

The creator mentioned when talking about the motivation behind this project that they've had issues with the gaps in the subscription based services (Spotify, Google Music, etc), whereas they've had good luck with finding music on YouTube.

If I were a musician in this situation I'd definitely not want to pull my music from YouTube.

Google is trying to use it's monopoly on online video to gain a competitive advantage in the music streaming market; that seems sketchy.

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