YouTube Turns 10 Years Old Today and The Music Industry Is Frightened

Happy Birthday YouTube!

You've created an amazing new channel for music discovery. Now it's time to fairly compensate the creators that are making you millions.

YouTube is turning 10 years old and its importance to the music industry can not be overstated. 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and a sizable portion of that is music related.Ask anyone under 25 where they check out new music and the vast majority will answer YouTube. Music videos – carefully produced, shot live with an iPhone or just scrolling lyrics – have become essential to music marketing.

YouTube's impressive stats:

YouTube has more than 1 billion users
Every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views
The number of hours people are watching on YouTube each month is up 50% year over year
300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
60% of a creator’s views comes from outside their home country
YouTube is localized in 75 countries and available in 61 languages
Half of YouTube views are on mobile devices
Mobile revenue on YouTube is up over 100% y/y

But many would argue that all of that music related activity has not resulted in commensurate income to musicians. And its clear that – despite a few carefully chosen word from their PR team – Google owned YouTube, like most big corporations, cares much more about their own profits than they do about treating musicians fairly. (Need proof? Check out indie musician Zoe Keating's recent struggle with YouTube.)

While we've heard rumors of rate renegotiations with the major labels, it seems doubtful that this inequity will shift significantly any time soon.