It's getting harder to make my 25 cents a day over at YouTube!
Here's a new exploit that threatens to affect anyone who uses Royalty Free Loop/Sample collections that they've purchased for commercial use:
Unscrupulous individuals are buying popular/bestselling loop collections and then creating extremely thin songs--ie, putting two sounds together on a track. They render these "songs" out, and then register them as copyrighted original works in YouTube's system.
If you then happen to use the same sounds in your own compositions, chances are excellent you'll be flagged as "Matching 3rd Party Content". Revenue sharing will be disabled on your video, and you'll have to initiate a challenge.
Now here's the exploit: yes, you've purchased a legal license to use these sounds commercially. But YouTube's challenge process gives the claimant 30 days to respond to your challenge, during which time your video earns no revenue for you--but instead earns revenue for the 3rd party!
So, troll waits 30 days, then releases the claim. And then, if you're unlucky, your video is immediately flagged as matching another one of these 3rd party "songs", and you're stuck for another 30 days of sending money to someone else.
The Loop company I use most seemed surprised when I brought this issue to their attention. But they got alarmed very quickly, as evidenced how fast my email was escalated to the higher levels of their company.
Ultimately it's probably going to take a combination of major players like Sony and professional (ie, famous) artists and producers pointing out that this could in effect render Loop collections useless to get YouTube to do anything about it.
Even if eventually you do clear this 3rd party match minefield, by then it may not matter. Videos often get most of their views when they debut, so 30 or 60 or 90 days later...you've lost the bulk of the video's earning potential.
Obviously sometimes sounds will match for non-nefarious reasons, but for shady types this is easy money right now, which means it's probably going to get a lot worse.
Here's a new exploit that threatens to affect anyone who uses Royalty Free Loop/Sample collections that they've purchased for commercial use:
Unscrupulous individuals are buying popular/bestselling loop collections and then creating extremely thin songs--ie, putting two sounds together on a track. They render these "songs" out, and then register them as copyrighted original works in YouTube's system.
If you then happen to use the same sounds in your own compositions, chances are excellent you'll be flagged as "Matching 3rd Party Content". Revenue sharing will be disabled on your video, and you'll have to initiate a challenge.
Now here's the exploit: yes, you've purchased a legal license to use these sounds commercially. But YouTube's challenge process gives the claimant 30 days to respond to your challenge, during which time your video earns no revenue for you--but instead earns revenue for the 3rd party!
So, troll waits 30 days, then releases the claim. And then, if you're unlucky, your video is immediately flagged as matching another one of these 3rd party "songs", and you're stuck for another 30 days of sending money to someone else.
The Loop company I use most seemed surprised when I brought this issue to their attention. But they got alarmed very quickly, as evidenced how fast my email was escalated to the higher levels of their company.
Ultimately it's probably going to take a combination of major players like Sony and professional (ie, famous) artists and producers pointing out that this could in effect render Loop collections useless to get YouTube to do anything about it.
Even if eventually you do clear this 3rd party match minefield, by then it may not matter. Videos often get most of their views when they debut, so 30 or 60 or 90 days later...you've lost the bulk of the video's earning potential.
Obviously sometimes sounds will match for non-nefarious reasons, but for shady types this is easy money right now, which means it's probably going to get a lot worse.