These are difficult times for working musicians. Last week, Plunky Bluester offered a hard look of the reality of gigging. Even pre-pandemic, few performers made anything like a living from live performances.
As for making it up with sales of music, well, we’re now into the second generation of consumers who have never paid to own recorded music and believe doing so is crazy. Those vanishingly few who actually pay for downloads and streams do through services that often pay the creators of the music next to nothing.
CDBaby’s online retail store was one of the few exceptions, offering artists (or labels, whoever owns the record) a 90% cut of a download’s price. This spring, CD Baby announced it was closing the “store,” though it would continue its service of distributing digital content to other suppliers. While DIY artists still have Bandcamp, where they can get a similar return on downloads, the loss of CDBaby’s somewhat old-fashioned service is a distinctly felt loss.
In other dreadful news, YouTube, whose parent corporation long ago abandoned its founding principle (new slogan: “Evil? I Dunno. What’s in it for me?”), has found an online activity they don’t control so must duplicate.
To compete with Tik Tok, the short-video-sharing app, YouTube introduced Shorts, a smart phone app that allows users to post short videos from their phones. If you make video and post it to YouTube, you likely got an email touting this exciting new service, an email you likely ignored, thinking, “I already know how to make videos, thanks.”
Read it again, or carefully read through all the options on your next upload. You may be surprised.
One of the features of the Shorts app that GooTube is touting is a vast music library available for Shorts videos. And guess who’s supplying that music.
You are.
When Google launched Shorts in April, a new box appeared deep in the settings of every video ever uploaded to YouTube. That box, which arrived already pre-checked allows Shorts “creators” to “sample the content” of every video on the site.
In other words, if you have ever labored to make a video of a music track and posted it on YouTube, or if a friend allowed you to use their odd little song in your cooking vid or if you happened to capture a performance by a favorite artist, all of that music is now licensed, without compensation for (or even notice to) for the original owner, to be synced with other people’s videos. Adding injury to injury, the Shorts make money for YouTube.
To be clear, this is not the same problem I was bitching about 3 years ago, when YouTube set impossibly high view-hours thresholds and booted millions of video makes from the ability to make money with ads. Nor is this related to the company’s new trick of putting ads on every video, whether appropriate or not.
This is a change to “terms and conditions” representing a declaration of free sync license on any music or sound ever uploaded to YouTube. Including yours. If you don’t wish to have your music used for strangers’ dogs’ videos, here’s what you must do:
Log into YouTube Studio and click on the word “Content” in the left-side menu. A list of all your uploads will appear. Click on each video title or thumbnail picture to get to the Edit Settings page. Don’t see “Rip off my music” button? That’s because it’s in the next menu down (“Show More”), where you add tags, allow embedding, etc. Look, there it is! “Allow people to sample this content”
Uncheck that box and, while you’re there, remember to SAVE your change.
Easy, right? Now do the same thing for every video you’ve ever uploaded to YouTube. I’ve got a few hundred public and unlisted vids, so it took a while.
So there’s the latest episode of the YouTube series “Don’t Be Evil is Sooooo Twentieth Century.” Hope it was useful.