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.

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.

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?

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.

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…”

ROFL

He’s the one being drained of cash, by parasites like Waterman.