IN BRIEF:
The bottom line? The dominant narrative around digitisation and the music industry is of piracy and the disruption to the traditional record industry model centred on purchases of physical media. How fair the payment splits are can be debated, but music video's viral potential does offer a chance to make money - even if its fans (re)making their own versions of an original video. Their work can deliver significant cash to the artists behind the original.
Its a simple but fundamental point if you want to understand how the music business works today: while debates may rage around streaming services such as Spotify and just how much/little remuneration they provide to artists, there is serious money to be made from distribution through
YouTube - and that includes fan-made vids/UGC (user-generated content). The lexicon of
YT would label many of these 'responses'.
Scroll to the bottom for info on the new YouTube-based record label, All Def Music, a collaboration between Russell Simmons, Universal Music Group and others.
This blog's description makes reference to the ongoing status of music video, and particularly to the scope of viral hits to raise serious revenues. Here's a little detail on how a much-mimicked video, in a very postmodern fashion (one that would gain a knowing smile from Andy Warhol, whose 'Factory' churned out 'his' work actually produced by others!), makes money directly from the multiple 'tributes', 'responses', remakes, term them what you will:
Those who enroll in the content ID service give YouTube a reference
file of their content. They then choose between getting videos that are
found to use that content blocked from the site, or taking a slice of
the advertising revenue those rip-off videos generate and tracking the
original's success.
