THE BPI TEARS LYOR ANOTHER ONE

There’s been another fiery response to Lyor Cohen’s YouTube propaganda post, this time from the boss of British trade body, BPI, Geoff Taylor. Cohen’s claims ignore a few inconvenient truths, says Taylor, including the fact that ad-supported revenues from video streaming grew by just 0.4% for U.K. labels last year, despite rapid growth in use of the platform.

Alongside the assertion that YouTube’s advertising business is “growing rapidly,”

Cohen claims YouTube’s subscription business will help drive the industry to a more lucrative place than ever before. But there is no YouTube pay tier in the U.K., where Red is yet to launch and there is “no effective funnel for users to Google Play subscriptions,” Taylor says. “YouTube isn’t helping to grow our subscriptions business, it’s undermining it. According to research from IPSOS, one in five internet users say they don’t pay for music because they get all the music they need from YouTube.

“YouTube isn’t such a great music discovery service as it might like to believe. Research from AudienceNet and IPSOS shows that two thirds to three quarters of YouTube music users use the service mainly to listen to music that they already know.”

On the subject of safe-harbor legislation being “a distraction” in the relationship between YouTube and the music industry, Taylor continues: “If the music industry is getting paid around 1/20th as much as it should by one of the biggest users of music on the planet, that’s a reasonable thing to obsess about.

“The simple way for YouTube to fix its disconnect with the music industry is to confirm publicly that it does not qualify for safe-harbor protection for music content, because it does not play a merely neutral, passive and technical role. This should be uncontroversial, given Lyor's claim that most music watch-time on the platform comes from a YouTube recommendation.”

Transforming YouTube into a positive force for music, is going to take a “fundamental shift in YouTube’s business practices so that it pays for the music it uses at a level similar to competing services,” Taylor concludes. “It can afford to do so. Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, is on course for revenues of $100b this year. That’s bigger than the GDP of Croatia and Slovenia combined (according to the IMF).”