Tracking unlicensed Pink Floyd videos on YouTube: a case study at Music 4.5
Using YouTube’s Content ID technology to determine when someone is infringing an artist’s copyright on the video-sharing website is not an exact science, noted Rebecca Lammers, digital music and video business consultant at Laniakea Music.
Content ID scans YouTube for audio and videos thought to be infringing copyright.
But to benefit from the detailed data analysis available via Content ID requires time-consuming attention, Lammers declared during the Rich Data edition of the Music 4.5 conference held yesterday (19 November), at Clifford’s Inn, London.
Permitted by UK super rock group Pink Floyd to disclose exclusive statistics of their content as a case study, she demonstrated the challenges of identifying which videos were licensed to be on YouTube, and which were not.
Basically, the data collected on 15 July for her presentation, Pink Floyd: An Artist’s YouTube Strategy, showed how difficult it can be for artists to monetise their content fully on the service “The line between promotional value and piracy is very thin on YouTube. If you try to take down or claim (remuneration) for every unlicensed video, you’ll drive yourself crazy,” she said about the challenges.
She had no beef against YouTube’s Content ID as such. “It does work,” she said. “But there is no consistency in how accurate it is across all the content on YouTube. Content ID doesn’t know the context in which the person searching is working in.”
She added: “The (band’s) management realised there is very little control over all the unlicensed material on YouTube, because there are millions of user-generated content (UGC) out there.”
This included Pink Floyd back catalogue licensed to Warner Music Group and content belonging to the band themselves. There were decades of videos, DVDs and bootlegs in the form of audio recordings, live performances, TV performances, and early films on the website.
“Although they were all on YouTube, none had been licensed and Pink Floyd was not making any money from them,” Lammers explained.
Although Laniakea Music could see who legally owned which content, whether it was the band, Warner Music or the respective music publishers, “in reality, the Top 10 search results did not include licensed versions.”
Then came the next batch of hard work required to file a claim for the videos that infringed copyright. Some had to be done manually in order to bring their attention to YouTube, and some were recognised by the Content ID system.
On 15 July, there was in total 697 million views of videos on YouTube. “It is incredibly difficult to come up with estimates because of all the variables involved,” Lammers stated. “It is difficult to estimate the number of views each video gets a day. We don’t know what time of the day those views took place. And sometimes, a video would have been uploaded several years ago but no one watched it until an event involving the artist made it relevant.”
As a result, it is tough to know how many ads were sold around those videos to make a financial claim. Even with Google Analytics, by YouTube’s search-engine parent company Google, it is hard to know which ads were served around with each video.
The Music 4.5 conference was sub-titled “Combining Audio & Video & Ad Tech & (Big Data) To Monetise Content”.
The industry experts speaking concluded that record labels and music publishers should make a greater effort to exploit data to improve how their artists’ work is monetised.
Chris Wistow, head of UK at Adswizz, explained how Internet radio enables one-to-one audio targeting of listeners, providing radio stations with extra audiences for advertising.
Robert Kaye, founder of music-data service provider Musicbrainz, launched a sister service called Acousticbrainz. It is a new open-source database designed to recognise the acoustic characteristics of a musical track.
Tom Gillet, co-founder of Metable, encouraged the industry to boost the income generated from music by merging the different database systems in the market.
Nick Carlton, chief financial officer at MirriAd (the next-generation product-placement format), demonstrated how native in-video advertising in music videos could benefit both brand owners and record labels.
Andy Linehan, curator of popular music at the British Library, showed why accurate data is essential for preserving the culture and heritage propping up the country’s pop-music business.
Additionally, Chris Carey, founder of Media Insight Consulting, warned that “Big Data is incomplete.” Users must be prepared to be more thorough about the research and the analysis of information gathered.
[Juliana Koranteng]