Fans of Metallica, Madonna, Red Hot Chili Peppers and other popular music acts will have to find another way to watch their favorite videos, as Warner Music Group has demanded YouTube to remove clips by its artists from the video sharing site.
Since Warner was not able to reach new licensing terms, the company asked for its videos to be taken out from YouTube, which is owned by Google.
The videos belonging to Warner Music gradually began vanishing from the Web site on Saturday, in spite of the fact that many clips were still available on Sunday evening.
As Google aims to enlarge its video advertising business and media companies require to be entirely paid off for the content they release online, music video streams may represent a new battlefield between the two parties.
The disagreements, however, shed light on the outstanding attractiveness music videos on the site benefit from, as YouTube is the world’s most popular video-sharing Web site.
While six of the site’s 10 most popular videos ever are music clips, measurement firm TubeMogul explains that musicians and record labels have brought about approximately eight billion views on YouTube.
According to a report by the New York Times, David Burch, the marketing manager for TubeMogul, said that YouTube owed a great part of its financial success to the variety of videos it included.
YouTube informed its users about the exclusion of content belonging to Warner Music, as well as Warner clips posted by various users, and explained that it would continue to collaborate with labels and artists in order to establish “user-friendly licensing arrangements.” YouTube made the announcement in a blog post on Friday.
On the other hand, Warner Music said in a statement that it could not sign an agreement that did not offer suitable and reasonable compensation to musicians, songwriters, publishers and labels.
Warner Music and other important record labels, such as Universal Music, Sony BMG and EMI, reached licensing pacts with YouTube a couple of years ago that offer the companies a rather small per-stream fee for each clip viewed on the Web site, as well as a share of the advertising revenue.
The dispute between Warner and YouTube was also generated by disagreements on whether the labels should be paid before or after the videos are viewed.
Warner Music’s contract with YouTube expired several months ago, according to a spokesman for the former, Will Tanous. The other major record labels are reportedly discussing terms of new licensing pacts.
Warner Music is expected to continue spreading music video content via the other Web sites it has licensing deals with, such as MySpace Music and AOL. In addition, videos can be watched on the artists’ official Web sites.
