Posted on April 17th, 2009 by Darien Graham-Smith

You feel exploited? Je ne sais pas pourquoi…

Pop mogul Pete Waterman is feeling hard done by. At a press conference last Thursday he announced that, in 2008, he’d made £11 in royalties for Rick Astley videos being viewed on YouTube – a sum with which he was not happy.“I get more from Radio Stoke playing Never Gonna Give You Up than I do from YouTube,” he pouted.

Well, this is an increasingly pressing issue. How should royalties work in the internet age?

Unfortunately, it rapidly became clear that Mr Waterman didn’t actually want to confront that question. What he wanted was our sympathy.

Tears on my pillow

“Panorama did a documentary on the exploitation of foreign workers in Dubai,” he continued, shifting into the tragic mode. “I feel like one of those workers. I earned less for a year’s work off Google or YouTube than they did off the Bahrain government.”

Now hang on: let’s compare. Over in UAE (not Bahrain) the BBC found a small army of displaced labourers, living nine to a room in unsanitary camps, putting in 60-hour weeks of hard construction work in the desert sun for a slave’s wage.

Here in Britain, meanwhile, Pete Waterman was paid £11 for… er, doing nothing. The money he made in 2008 from Never Gonna Give You Up (and I bet the YouTube royalties are a tiny fraction of the total) actually accrued without his lifting a finger. Can he really imagine that’s a comparable “year’s work”?

Wouldn’t change a thing

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying royalty payments are inherently bad. I have friends who do believe that, and I can see why – commercial considerations aren’t always a positive influence on creativity. Personally, though, I think it’s all right to give artists some special rights as an investment in our musical culture.

But I’m frankly gobsmacked that Waterman can, with a straight face, suggest that his modest sitting-on-arse dividend somehow puts him in the same boat as a Middle Eastern construction worker. The self-delusion would be hilarious if it weren’t so offensive. Especially since the song he’s still being paid for was written and recorded a little over twenty two years ago.

Give me just a little more time

Of course, while twenty two years is several lifetimes in pop music, in terms of copyright it’s a mere interlude. Under current UK law the respective estates of Messrs Stock, Aitken and Waterman are entitled to coin it in off the back of Rick Astley’s infamous ditty until the day they die – and for another seventy years beyond that.

You may think that’s excessive. I do: I’d have thought a much shorter term (say, ten years) would do more to encourage artists to keep creating new works, while at the same time allowing us to make free use of our cultural heritage. But the law is what it is, and legally Mr Waterman has every right to his royalties.

I should be so lucky

All the same, imagine if you had the good fortune to be on the receiving end of such a system. Imagine if you had the good fortune of finding that a song you co-authored two decades ago had, quite at the whim of fate, and with no input from you, had a sudden resurgence in popularity. Would you stand up before the press and complain that you deserved more money?

Or would you perhaps count yourself lucky, take whatever came your way with gratitude and shut the hell up?

Posted in: Random

Permalink | Trackback

Follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Social Bookmark this article: What is this?

13 Responses to “ You feel exploited? Je ne sais pas pourquoi… ”

David Wright Says:
April 17th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Without knowing how often the song was played, the 11 quid is a nonsense complaint.

If it was played twice, then he did well, if it was played a million times, then he has a right to complain… But 11 quid for a year doesn’t mean anything, in and of itself.

Still, Rick Astley… Hmm… Shouldn’t he be paying us compensation for the suffering? Or does he call it self inflicted?
Darien Graham-Smith Says:
April 17th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Waterman claims the song was accessed a shocking 154 million times on YouTube last year. I’d love to know where he got this figure from. So far as I can make out, the statistics on the various copies of the song posted on YouTube total around 25M views – across all years.

And while that’s still a lot of visitors, I have a funny feeling that not many of them stayed on the page for more than a few seconds…
Lise Says:
April 17th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Fun/Love/Money?
technogeist Says:
April 17th, 2009 at 11:56 pm
Umm.. How much did Rick Astley get?

He’s the one being drained of cash, by parasites like Waterman.
technogeist Says:
April 17th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
‘our cultural heritage’ ?

ROFL
John Says:
April 20th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
I’m sorry, but I think Waterman has a point, (however badly he put it across).

Why should YouTube, (who did nothing but allow someone else to upload the video onto their site) receive all the advertising revenue from the tens of millions of hits the video received – and yet give virtually nothing to the people who created it?

People talk about internet piracy being bad, but the vast, vast majority of internet pirates are private individuals who make no money at all – whereas as times YouTube is essentially profiteering from piracy on an industrial scale.

The Pirate Bay, (whose founders are now facing jail) have an old 15th century ship as their symbol. Well, if the Pirate Bay are a 15th century ship, YouTube is a 21st century aircraft super-carrier fleet based around the USS Nimitz.

The difference? A multi-billion dollar share price and a slew of powerful lawyers – with the David and Goliath roles being reversed.

“Get stuffed artists, you’ll take what we give you and there’s nothing you can do about it…”
John Hind Says:
April 21st, 2009 at 11:54 am
John – You are clearly someone who never lets mere facts get in the way of his prejudices, but I would point out that YouTube is generally accepted to be haemorrhaging money from Google at an alarming rate – $470m this year according to Credit Suisse.
John Says:
April 21st, 2009 at 3:24 pm
“John – You are clearly someone who never lets mere facts get in the way of his prejudices.”

Really?

So which facts have I ignored and which prejudices have I demonstrated then John Hind? Pray tell.

Also, what is the fact that YouTube is proving to be a spectacularly bad investment for Google have to do with this specific argument?

YouTube, like the Pirate Bay, allows access to other peoples media, and also like the Pirate Bay, often without that media owners permission.

Pete Waterman’s work has been seen somewhere between 25m and 154m times, (whichever set of figures you believe). Are you seriously suggesting that £11 is a fair proportion of the revenue Youtube would have generated off the back of these tens of millions of visits?

Why won’t YouTube / Google allow their figures to be released to the artists?

I wasn’t saying Piracy was in any way a good thing, I was merely pointing out that throwing a few coppers at someone and saying you’ve paid them fairly, (when they would have made disproportionately more) is tantamount to the same thing.
Nick Says:
April 21st, 2009 at 4:37 pm
It would be useful to know if Astley, who performed the song got paid an equivalent amount.

Yes there’s no effort required, but in the same way I can’t see Microsoft giving XP away for free after a year of sales, or reducing the massive cost of client licences on that same principle.

What would be sensible is some balanced accounting. The publisher initially recoups their costs of promotion and media and then receives 20% of sales, the author 80% Sadly for your average paperback the author only receives about 50p.

But how else can a single artist get out to sell to tens of thousands of people? If I publish my book, and go through Lulu for the printing per volume the cheapest I can sell at is £10 to make £1. Obviously if I sell as an ebook I can do so for £2, but I may sell a dozen, twenty at best as I can’t afford to promote. This is where publishers and studios come in.

Pete Waterman is a millionaire through providing content to people to re-use. As a compare, if I wrote a book and it was still selling I would like to make money from it. It’s my work after all. Is that wrong, or are we grumpy because he’s rich and wants to get richer?
Mikesey Says:
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:29 am
I agree with Darien.It was always my understanding that YouTube pays a fee to publishers of music and record companies, and is currently having a spat with the UK Performing Rights Society who want to impose extortionate fees for use of the videos uploaded to YouTube. YouTube will not pay so have therefore blocked access to music videos to viewers in the UK as a result.
The PRS have ‘cut their nose to spite their face’, as they now realise that YouTube exposure increases sales of CD albums.
I have not found any band, or artist who objects to their work being used as background to an amateur video, or the complete video being used on YouTube, indeed they are quite positive about it, realising that their music is still being heard & seen in places where it may not have been shown or heard previously. Some even scan the search box to see if they have “made it” by being on YouTube.
Edward Barnwell Says:
April 23rd, 2009 at 11:43 pm
Mikesey said: ‘The UK Performing Rights Society who want to impose extortionate fees for use of the videos uploaded to YouTube.’
This is utter nonsense.
Quote from http://www.themusicvoid.com/?p=330:
“Let’s go back in time a little to when the standard licensing rate for premium music videos (that is, the videos posted by Artists and Labels, as opposed to the millions(?) of videos uploaded by YouTube users themselves) was £0.01 per stream. YouTube were not happy with that rate and managed to get it down to £0.0025 per stream. And yet it was still unhappy. When PRS refused to negotiate down any further, YouTube (and it’s parent Google) decided to throw its proverbial toys out of the pram and in grand corporate bullying style they arrived at the current stalemate where UK users are being refused access to premium music video content from its website (which reportedly alone accounts for up to 25% of all Search Engine clicks).”

This equates to £0.000022p per stream for the aforementioned Rick Astley stream.

I would describe this not so much as extortionate, more like Dickensian.
Edward Barnwell Says:
April 23rd, 2009 at 11:54 pm
To clarify the last post I made, the £0.000022 per stream is based on this article http://musically.com/blog/2009/03/16/pete-waterman-ive-earned-11-from-rickrolling-vid-on-youtube/
However, even the ¼ penny per stream demanded by the PRS is still hardly extortionate. Why shouldn’t the people who created the music be rewarded? Youtube is nothing without music, and, amazing though it might seem, some people try to make a living creating that music.
Jakomi Mathews Says:
April 25th, 2009 at 8:44 am
Lets be very clear. Artist should be compensated for there musical works? Or is it that a lot of the people in the software sector see artists and there musical art as worthless. So if I was to flip this scenario and managed to work out how to rip your software patents of and give away access to your software for free – You would not be in the least bit angry?

Being paid £11 for even 25m spins of your music is being ripped off simple! Regardless of our personal tastes in music or software.

The problem is this: Youtube can only get £1.50 per thousand CPM on its advertising because to scale its business it had to use UGC content. Brands will not pay decent rates for UGC as it devalues premium content and also takes away advertiser control of the target demographic they are aiming at. This in turn is why Youtube is burning a big hole in Googles pockets. Not the music streams rates.

If other ad-funded models can get in some cases between 10 – 20 times what Youtube gets in terms of advertising CPM rates then it is Youtube’s lack of ability to leverage its content that is the problem and nothing else.

Scale needs to be a two way street. If your business is based on only scaling for your business and not you and the content owners from which your business derives most of its traffic then quite simply you do not have a business!

if you want a good and balanced analysis check this out: http://www.themusicvoid.com/?p=342

Stop blaming the artist and music content owners. Wake up and realise it is a two way street.