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Christina Vaughan, chief executive of music licensing organisation CueSongs, tells us how songwriters and the wider industry can earn from the explosion in short form video.
We live in interesting times. Consider the fact that it took television 67 years to hit four billion viewers while it has taken digital little over five years to achieve the same reach. What does this mean for songwriters and how can they make money from the online video revolution?
Ours is a society of constant partial attention. For every five hours spent in front of a screen, we consume seven hours of content across multiple devices. So, the fact that the industry made more from vinyl sales than it did from YouTube in 2015 should not serve as a warning against working with the platform, but rather an impetus for us all to embrace this new economy and start generating meaningful revenues for our songwriters.
We can now participate in a whole new digital economy based around syncing commercial music to short form content - an area where the opportunity is multiplying on an hourly basis. There were 5.9 trillion short form video views in the first three quarters of 2015, with growth more than doubling from quarter four of 2014. These volumes are certainly impressive, but they also highlight the inevitability in all of this. The whole market has already moved and we need to be at the forefront of understanding what represents the ‘new value’.
Let’s take a quick look at the short form video arena. PewDiePie, its biggest and most successful creator, lives on YouTube and Twitch, making engaging and influential content in a way that a TV celebrity could never know. Every day, he uploads multiple videos for his 42 million subscribers.
But wait, these subscribers aren’t watching 30 minute episodes or feature films, they’re not even watching three minutes of adverts: they’re viewing snatches of insight, moments of conscious and unconscious thought. And, most importantly, they’re part of a new generation whose primary online destination is YouTube – an authentic peer-to-peer hangout where they can plug in with likeminded people.
Although PewDiePie is heralded as a prime example, he’s actually the exception: the average YouTube content creator has a lot less viewers. The new economy has enabled online democracy, allowing just about anyone to create a YouTube channel. And at CueSongs, we seek to work with those creators who upload around 30 to 50 videos per month - the professionals who’re successfully posting regular, structured, formatted content. From a songwriter’s perspective, that’s a hell of a lot of syncable targets in a market which is literally growing by the hour.
To date, these creators have avoided using commercial music. But we’re committed to changing this. Having operated in this space for the five years since YouTube first started monetising content, we are seeing increasing opportunities to offer sync licences to this hugely expanding market.
We owe it to our musicians to deliver the answer from within the industry. Peter Gabriel set up our company because he believes the market for syncing commercial music should not belong to an elite group of TV and film music supervisors but should be accessible to a whole generation who have now become production companies in their own right, enabled by YouTube. We have a deep understanding of the issues and believe that engaging, emotionally compelling music by real bands and musicians should be the soundtrack to the internet - not just at YouTube but across all new media platforms.
It’s no coincidence that social media’s two other giants, Twitter and Facebook, have also invested considerable resources over the past year in expanding their online video efforts. The music industry has a long history of underplaying the role of video, seeing it as merely a promotional tool. But it’s time we give online sync the chance to flip this narrative. Good storytelling is all about emotional connectivity and authenticity, and deserves commercial music. At the same time, musicians and the wider music industry deserve a solution that enables financial compensation for use of their work.
The message is clear; we can no longer allow royalty-free libraries to eat our lunch. The time is right to fully engage online video as a direct revenue stream, to license commercial music for short form sync and create a substantive new revenue stream for artists in the explosive world of online content creation. We need to finally celebrate the fact that we can lead the way. The industry’s previous struggles with filesharing and online distribution were once seen as a paradigm of how the internet challenged ingrained power structures. Now there is an even greater change agent on the horizon – the online video star.
Related:
10 things the music industry can learn from Youtubers
Record labels don't 'get' YouTube, says expert
We live in interesting times. Consider the fact that it took television 67 years to hit four billion viewers while it has taken digital little over five years to achieve the same reach. What does this mean for songwriters and how can they make money from the online video revolution?
Ours is a society of constant partial attention. For every five hours spent in front of a screen, we consume seven hours of content across multiple devices. So, the fact that the industry made more from vinyl sales than it did from YouTube in 2015 should not serve as a warning against working with the platform, but rather an impetus for us all to embrace this new economy and start generating meaningful revenues for our songwriters.
‘The time is right to fully engage online video as a direct revenue stream’
We can now participate in a whole new digital economy based around syncing commercial music to short form content - an area where the opportunity is multiplying on an hourly basis. There were 5.9 trillion short form video views in the first three quarters of 2015, with growth more than doubling from quarter four of 2014. These volumes are certainly impressive, but they also highlight the inevitability in all of this. The whole market has already moved and we need to be at the forefront of understanding what represents the ‘new value’.
Let’s take a quick look at the short form video arena. PewDiePie, its biggest and most successful creator, lives on YouTube and Twitch, making engaging and influential content in a way that a TV celebrity could never know. Every day, he uploads multiple videos for his 42 million subscribers.
But wait, these subscribers aren’t watching 30 minute episodes or feature films, they’re not even watching three minutes of adverts: they’re viewing snatches of insight, moments of conscious and unconscious thought. And, most importantly, they’re part of a new generation whose primary online destination is YouTube – an authentic peer-to-peer hangout where they can plug in with likeminded people.
Although PewDiePie is heralded as a prime example, he’s actually the exception: the average YouTube content creator has a lot less viewers. The new economy has enabled online democracy, allowing just about anyone to create a YouTube channel. And at CueSongs, we seek to work with those creators who upload around 30 to 50 videos per month - the professionals who’re successfully posting regular, structured, formatted content. From a songwriter’s perspective, that’s a hell of a lot of syncable targets in a market which is literally growing by the hour.
To date, these creators have avoided using commercial music. But we’re committed to changing this. Having operated in this space for the five years since YouTube first started monetising content, we are seeing increasing opportunities to offer sync licences to this hugely expanding market.
'Compelling music by real songwriters and musicians should be the soundtrack to the internet'
We owe it to our musicians to deliver the answer from within the industry. Peter Gabriel set up our company because he believes the market for syncing commercial music should not belong to an elite group of TV and film music supervisors but should be accessible to a whole generation who have now become production companies in their own right, enabled by YouTube. We have a deep understanding of the issues and believe that engaging, emotionally compelling music by real bands and musicians should be the soundtrack to the internet - not just at YouTube but across all new media platforms.
It’s no coincidence that social media’s two other giants, Twitter and Facebook, have also invested considerable resources over the past year in expanding their online video efforts. The music industry has a long history of underplaying the role of video, seeing it as merely a promotional tool. But it’s time we give online sync the chance to flip this narrative. Good storytelling is all about emotional connectivity and authenticity, and deserves commercial music. At the same time, musicians and the wider music industry deserve a solution that enables financial compensation for use of their work.
The message is clear; we can no longer allow royalty-free libraries to eat our lunch. The time is right to fully engage online video as a direct revenue stream, to license commercial music for short form sync and create a substantive new revenue stream for artists in the explosive world of online content creation. We need to finally celebrate the fact that we can lead the way. The industry’s previous struggles with filesharing and online distribution were once seen as a paradigm of how the internet challenged ingrained power structures. Now there is an even greater change agent on the horizon – the online video star.
Related:
10 things the music industry can learn from Youtubers
Record labels don't 'get' YouTube, says expert
