Distribution Company Or Devious Criminals?

          “Each time there is a new way for an artist to make money, a new way emerges for others to take it from them.” It is shocking to learn that with todays rights and laws that a music distribution company can take a percentage out of a artists pay checked they earned from YouTube. Companies schemes work by them claiming that they, not the musician, own the rights to the recordings for licensing into videos on YouTube. The fact is that distribution companies don't own the licensing to the music artist create. On YouTube, there are different ways to make money. The first is from views of your own videos - this is called a channel. The second is from views of videos which use your music - this is a claim.          
          The best way for an artist to keep their money is doing it themselves. On the channel, if a musician wrote a song, recorded it, and made a video, like an official music video, they would have the copyrights for the video, the recording of the song (the master), and the lyrics and melody to the song (composition). Once the video is add to your channel you can post ads with it. When the ads generate money, YouTube pays the artist about 55% of what they received from the advertiser. On the other hand, musicians can use claims to gain revenue. However, distribution companies have a contract with YouTube that allows the distributors to tell YouTube that they control the rights to the music of a song

being used. Theses contracts are called 'direct licensing contracts'.With these contracts, the distributor  

can create ads on the musicians videos and create their own revenue from the ads. Now, the distributors

have the artists money, the take a cut of whatever percentage they want. They mislead the artist by

calling it a distribution fee. "Let’s be clear.It is NOT a distribution fee,

the distributor did not “distribute” anything to YouTube. It’s a

'we’re taking a piece of your revenue because we can' fee."

          Jeff Price, the author of this article, has created two foundations- TuneCore and Audiam.

TuneCore was the original one Prince founded but it turned dirty because the investors did have the

artists best interest in mind. He then created Audiam that give musicians 100% of the revenue from the

views they receive on their own views as well as other peoples videos. I think that by giving musicians

the proper amount of money for what they created will help the music industry. If musicians get a

amount of money they deserve, they will create more music which will help the industry.

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/08/13/stealingartists
This Is How Distribution Companies Are Stealing Artists' YouTube Revenue... - Digital Music News. (2013, August 13). Retrieved January 9, 2015, from http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/08/13/stealingartists