YouTube Curation and Intellectual Property
Will increased legal crackdowns eliminate an important part of the world's largest music streaming platform?
YouTube Music is a growing entity, but YouTube itself is the largest music streaming service in the world by a wide margin. It’s a fascinating and overwhelming place for discovery with an incredibly vast array of licensed and unlicensed musical offerings. Thankfully, YouTube curators provide some much needed assistance in sorting through an endless avalanche of sound.
Many YouTube curators run channels that specialize in lesser known and/or out of print music. The recordings they provide are often sourced from from cassettes, video games, vinyl, and other forms of physical media. Their videos are typically a static image of cover art for a given release coupled with the appropriate audio. Some of the most popular curators earn several hundred thousand followers and millions - potentially billions - of views on their uploads.
Many of the anonymous folks who run these channels don’t seek fame or money. Making the music they love more accessible to people seems to be the ultimate endgame.
However, the efforts of YouTube curators are not always appreciated. In early 2022 the popular Nintendo music archivist GilvaSunner took down their entire channel after receiving 3,500 copyright blocks from Nintendo in about one week’s time. They had an incredible 473,000 subscribers and 1.5 billion views thanks to a decade plus of uploads.
The lack of access to Nintendo music through official sources has long been a point of frustration for the company’s biggest fans. Now a thriving thriving bootleg market exists in part because of the lack of legitimate offerings. Journalist Mat Ombler wrote about this issue thoughtfully in several Video Games Chronicle (VGC) pieces. He noted in the 2022 article “Nintendo, it’s time to release your music properly” that “Nintendo’s fierce protection of its IP” makes accessibility worse and leads to more piracy.
The owner of the 13-year-old Soulhawk channel could be in a similar position someday. In 13 years of operations they’ve amassed an impressive 106,000 followers and 66,640,010 views thanks to their diverse offering of soul 45s. The owner of the channel wrote in an undated post on the channel’s About page that they had two copyright strikes and one more could be the end.
Based on the information in the post it seems the actual artists and their families are largely in support of Soulhawk’s work, it’s the record label people who have taken issue. “I find it strange that record companies would object to these musical heroes getting just a little bit more exposure, even in such a small way as the records I post,” they wrote. “The ONLY reason I started the channel was to take these records off the shelves and try to find a loving audience for them. No personal gain, for I get all I need just playing them.”
I appreciate the complexity of intellectual property and copyright law. I understand how and why an artist, composer, producer, etc. might be against the use of their music on one of these pages. However, I think it is short-sighted of the music industry to not see the benefit of these pages and their curators. They are capable of generating a significant amount of renewed interest in artists with long-dormant careers, which can lead to increased licensed streams and physical sales. And uploads from collector/fan accounts sometimes seem to act as both a funnel and enhancer for official accounts.
I look at Delegation’s 1978 classic “Oh Honey” as a good example of multiple YouTube uploads of the same song helping overall streaming numbers. The version uploaded under The Delegation topic (provided to YouTube by State Records) has over 25 million views and the version on the State Records channel has 9.8 million. There’s also what appears to be a licensed version on the Soulverse account with a whopping 46 million views.
Three licensed uploads of the same song have 10 million views or more - an astonishing number considering the fact that “Oh Honey” is 44 years old. But there are also a multitude of unofficial uploads of the video with hundreds of thousands and millions of views. It doesn’t seem like anyone is cracking down on these and the lack of penalties are in no way hurting the song’s performance.
“Oh Honey” was already a well-known classic before the dawn of YouTube and only a small percentage of songs can expect the same level of success. However, it is interesting to consider how Nintendo and various record labels might also benefit if they spent more energy on uploading licensed versions of their catalog instead of trying to take unlicensed versions down.
Might it serve the greater good if Nintendo and record labels worked with music enthusiasts on YouTube or at least made the decision to look the other way? These curators connect their dedicated followings with music from the past at a scale that few other platforms provide niche music. If Nintendo decides to finally release their music across YouTube and other streaming services in an official capacity, one has to wonder how pages like GilvaSunner’s could work in tandem with the licensed uploads as a force multiplier to boost streams and sales of physical releases.
YouTube curators are not selling the music they love for personal financial gain. They’re sharing it with a captive audience. In my opinion, cracking down on these people without further considering the value they might provide is short-sighted and doesn’t consider the complexity and grey area of intellectual property in the world today.
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