Google defends Youtube's importance to the music industry

Google, Youtube's parent company, has conducted research into Youtube's impact on the music industry and not unsurprisingly it believes it benefits the music industry massively.

The music industry believes that Youtube is having a negative impact on their business because Youtube pays out a fraction of what other streaming services pay out to rights holders and artists.

This had led to a lot of labels and rights holders to voice their concern over Youtube's minuscule payments in recent months.

Google recently announced it pays out around 1 billion dollars every year to the music industry, and their latest research suggests that "in the absence of YouTube, most time spent listening to music on YouTube would be lost or shifted to lower value music channels."

Its research also suggests that "in the absence of YouTube, time spent listening to pirated content would increase by 29%, suggesting that people are going to YouTube instead of pirating music."

And finally, "blocking music from YouTube does not lead to an increase in streams on other platforms."

Labels and right holders believe that because Youtube operates under the outdated safe harbour rule, there isn't a level playing field compared to other streaming services such as Spotify and Tidal and therefore they're missing out on billions in revenue.

"Google's latest publicity push once again seeks to distract from the fact that YouTube, essentially the world's largest on-demand music service, is failing to license music on a fair basis and compensate artists and producers properly by claiming it is not liable for the music it is making available," the IFPI said in a statement. "Legislative action is required to address the 'value gap' that is denying music creators a fair return for their work."