March 10, 2009 by James Oliver
The guys at YouTube must be wondering whether they’ll ever resolve the issues with music on their site. Not only are they still trying to resolve issues with record companies relating to the showing of music videos on their site, yesterday they lost most of their most popular videos as a result of a separate battle with the Performing Rights Society (PRS), the body responsible for collecting royalties for musicians.
The issue, from YouTube’s point of view anyway, is that after the expiry of the deal they had in place with PRS expired, they imposed new terms which would have made it financially prohibitive for the site. In fact YouTube claim that PRS wanted more to show the videos than YouTube actually make from the adverts next to them.
Another sticking point was that PRS were refusing to let YouTube know which songs and performers were covered by which license which is integral to YouTube’s content ID system, the system which reimburses rights holders every time a song is viewed.
The real losers in all this are the musicians, most of whom are far from wealthy and will not be happy about losing a revenue stream like this. In an attempt to head off this wave of bad publicity PRS rushed to point out that it did not advise YouTube to remove the videos and in fact counselled them against it
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