A musician’s career can live and die by YouTube. The video platform has started careers — Macklemore and Ryan Lewis were pretty much unheard of before they became a YouTube sensation with “Thrift Shop”— and can generate six-figure salaries for artists who may have no other income.
But more commonly, musicians are getting just a few bucks here and there off YouTube, hoping they’ll gather enough fans online to take their act to the live stage. The challenges of monetizing music through YouTube was the centerpiece of one of the most heated debates at Tuesday’s SF MusicTech Summit, a biannual event in San Francisco that brings together some of the top business leaders, music industry experts, developers, and yes, performing musicians themselves.
Many — maybe even most — artists would agree that YouTube has done more to help than hurt emerging artists. There are few places where one can be so quickly discovered and catapulted to celebrity status, and it’s no exaggeration that many people make a living through the platform. Proper YouTubing takes work — maintaining a channel with lots of fresh videos, using professional-grade videographers and photographers, tagging videos and featuring images with the that help establish an artist’s “brand” (artists cringe at the idea of “branding,” but they’ve got to do it, industry experts say). Posting a video some fan shot on an iPhone every few months won’t cut it.
But as YouTube has grown, so has discontent among artists, who say recent changes to the platform shut out new and undiscovered artists.
“The creative community has been in an uproar recently,” said Jack Conte of Patreon, a crowdfunding platform where artists can raise money through videos. Conte, a videographer and musician, spoke at the summit.
In the most recent upgrade in May, YouTube reconfigured the subscription box that features video uploads so that only the most popular channels or most shared videos show up, and viewers may not see content from unknown artists.
As the company scales, YouTube has made adjustments similar to Facebook to manage the growing amount of content, and is asserting more editorial control over which videos to feature for viewers.
“It’s too bad because you have artists who are making a living on other videos and now their videos aren’t showing up in the subscriber box,” said Ryan Born of AdRev, also speaking on Tuesday’s panel.
Some also say that YouTube hasn’t adequately addressed the problem of the thousands and thousands of unauthorized uploads, or videos posted by third parties without permission from the artist. Unauthorized uploads can still feature advertisements, and the revenue that should go to the artist instead goes to someone else. YouTube keeps approximately 45 percent of advertising revenue.
Others say YouTube, like other digital platforms, has contributed to the degradation of the craft of music. More artists are producing tracks specifically for YouTube so they can market it to advertisers, creating songs with some retailer in mind.
But then again, for artists making pennies from Spotify and playing dive bars for the price of a few beers, maybe that income is a matter of survival.
YouTube will roll out in November an offline viewing mode for the mobile app, allowing viewers to upload videos to their account that they can they watch for up to two days without Internet access. Ads will still play in the offline mode, meaning revenue will continue to flow.
“Your fans’ ability to enjoy your videos no longer has to be interrupted by something as commonplace as a morning commute,” said a YouTube blog post.
However, not everyone is a fan of the new feature. Vevo, one of YouTube’s biggest content suppliers, has said it will block any offline viewing.
“We’re not going to allow viewing of our music videos or other programming in offline mode,” a Vevo spokesperson told Variety last month.
Vevo’s opposition suggests some conflict between the two companies. But Issac Bess, who works on the company’s strategic partnerships, said YouTube’s relationship with Vevo was healthy and he was uncertain whether the offline viewing feature would impact Vevo’s business.
