PRS agrees terms with Spotify but YouTube row continues

Thursday April 9, 2009

The deal ensures that the 60,000 members of PRS will be fairly paid when their music is used on the site, but no deal with YouTube has been reached.

The agreement was announced at a campaign briefing for the Fair Play For Creators campaign, organised by PRS For Music. It is calling upon YouTube’s owners, Google, to treat music fairly when it is used online and to pay going rates for music.

PRS chairman Ellis Rich, Pete Waterman and Billy Bragg spoke at the meeting, which was also attended by UK Music chief executive Fergal Sharkey, former Alisha’s Attic singer Shelley Poole and other songwriters.

Rich called the taking down of videos from YouTube by Google “highly discourteous”, and says the video sharing site, “ride roughshod, arrogantly and ruthlessly over the music creators that contributed to YouTube’s success.”

“Maybe we should be calling them ‘Me-Tube’, because they certainly don’t care much about you,” says Rich. “[Our members] all deserve fair representation and recompense for their creativity whenever and wherever it is used for profit, benefit or advantage.”

He adds, “PRS was the first collective society in the world to licence YouTube. We understand the world has changed and is still changing, but this does not mean that creators do not still deserve to be paid for their efforts.”

Waterman says that despite Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up receiving 154m hits on YouTube, he received only £11 in royalties from Google. Waterman says he receives more money when the song is played on Radio Stoke than on YouTube.

Bragg, who performed his 2008 single I Keep Faith, says, “The record industry has always told us there’s no such thing as free lunch, if we’re not careful we’re going to provide the free lunch. We’re the meat in the sandwich between the music industry and the internet. Artists have got to find an independent voice as well as supporting initiatives such as this by PRS.

“We need to organise and put our voice into this debate that’s going on about the digital music industry rather than waiting to be invited.”

Negotiations between PRS For Music and YouTube are ongoing.