Indie Musicians Get New Revenue Stream As YouTube Opens Partner Program To All
YouTube has been been paying a percentage of ad revenue to a small percentage of top video producers. Now they've opened their YouTube Partners program and the revenue that comes with it to just about everyone.
To become a YouTube Partner, you need to enable your excisting or new YouTube account. You must also control the rights for the video and music that you post. The YouTube faq reads:
"For your videos to be eligible for monetization, you must own all the necessary rights to commercially use all visuals and audio, whether they belong to you or a third party. By commercial use rights, we mean the rights to make money from the video."
The YouTube Partner program is now available to all in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States.
Of course, nothing about covering other people’s songs is spelled out there. YouTube says you need to own all the necessary rights, but there are YouTube partners that perform songs they didn’t write and they likely haven’t obtained synch rights.
The only question I have is where do I go to get my songs published? I am a songwriter lookin’ to get my songs published. Can anybody tell me that?
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I operate a YouTube Music Network and YouTube is absolutely correct in that you cannot monetize cover songs. You have never been able to.
When partners do covers, they are not making money on them, the ads running against cover songs are placed there by the rights holder of the artist being covered and in a perfect world, that entity is paying the artist.
What has been confusing is whether you are eligible to be a partner if you include cover songs among your uploads.
You are saying you don’t get ad money from cover songs, which I think is fairly clear. But what hasn’t been clear, at least in the past, is whether you qualified for partner status at all if you did cover songs.
However, since partners have been doing this all along, YouTube doesn’t appear to have enforced any “no cover songs to be a partner” rule.
What they should say is whatever cover songs you do don’t contribute to your ad money, but you can still become a partner if you do cover songs.
Okay. This is what I am talking about.
YouTube – Broadcast Yourself.: Qualifications
To become a YouTube Partner, you must meet these minimum requirements:
* You create original videos suitable for online streaming.
* You own or have express permission to use and monetize all audio and video content that you upload—no exceptions.
Here’s an interesting article. It goes into detail about how to make money from a cover song and it even talks about advertising from a YouTube cover song, but it isn’t clear to me that the band doing the cover is going to get any of that money. You can read my questions in the comments section.
How to turn a YouTube hit into Dollars and Fans | Topspin Media