Irving Azoff Slams YouTube Over Low Artist Royalties: ‘By Far the Worst Offender’

Irving Azoff inactive has a bony to prime with YouTube implicit the streaming giant’s royalties to artists.  

“YouTube is by acold the worst offender,” the famed creator manager and entrepreneur said connected Friday (Sept. 26) astatine The Wrap’s TheGrill 2025. “I’m truly not fond of erstwhile companies instrumentality vantage of creators.” 

Citing numbers disposable done Global Music Rights (GMR), the show rights enactment helium founded successful 2013, Azoff said YouTube’s royalty rates are a 5th of its nearest rival contempt having 5 times that competitor’s yearly revenue. That gives YouTube “unchecked” powerfulness erstwhile it comes to negotiating with rights holders specified arsenic GMR, SESAC, Paramount, Fox Television, Univision and NBC Universal, helium added.

“When you get down to the extremity of a dialog with them, they telephone your artists, they telephone your grounds companies,” Azoff continued. “They spell retired and [say], ‘We’re going to instrumentality your euphony down.’” 

Azoff has been voicing his opinions astir YouTube for astatine slightest a decade. In a February 2016 interrogation with The New York Times, helium lambasted the video streaming level for paying excessively small to creators and hiding down the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) “safe harbor” proviso that allowed it to big euphony videos uploaded by its users. “When you’re dealing with these tech companies,” helium said, “they are worthy zillions of dollars, much than the nett worthy of the full euphony industry.” 

At Clive Davis’ pre-Grammy Awards gala a fewer days later, Azoff warned the euphony manufacture not to “be pacified by articulator work astir efforts to make paid subscription services.” At the time, euphony depletion was skyrocketing, manufacture revenues were astatine an all-time low, and YouTube’s poorly monetized escaped streams were competing against burgeoning subscription services. “It’s a strategy that is rigged against the ­artists,” Azoff told Billboard in May 2016. “In my years arsenic a manager, I haven’t seen specified a superior menace to artists.”  

Azoff besides lambasted YouTube astatine the aforesaid The Wrap event successful October 2016, calling the institution “very evil” and citing its usage of the Clinton-era DMCA. “We’re astatine a time, particularly successful music, erstwhile there’s specified a deficiency of respect for intelligence property, and they’re the worst offender of it,” helium said.  

Since 2016, YouTube has launched assorted subscription services to complement its halfway ad-supported escaped platform, including YouTube Music, which presently has a 10% stock of the planetary euphony subscription market, according to MIDiA Research. But ad-supported royalties person faltered successful caller years, and galore euphony manufacture sources person told Billboard that YouTube Shorts, YouTube’s short-form video format, is apt a origin down a decrease successful euphony royalties from the video platform.  

Music companies aren’t unsocial successful opposing the tech giant. NBCUniversal is presently mired successful a licensing quality with YouTube TV and warned connected Monday (Sept. 29) that its programming could beryllium pulled from the platform. “YouTube TV has refused the champion rates and presumption successful the market, demanding preferential attraction and seeking an unfair vantage implicit competitors to predominate the video marketplace — each nether the mendacious pretense of warring for the consumer,” NBCUniversal said successful a statement. 

NBCUniversal’s confrontation with YouTube could extremity up being adjuvant for music, said Azoff astatine the lawsuit connected Friday. “You got to anticipation astatine immoderate constituent thing goes connected that forces them to travel to the party,” helium said. “But erstwhile you got radical similar [chairman and CEO of NBCUniversal proprietor Comcast] Brian Roberts making nationalist statements astir it, it’s better. So, I’m much hopeful that thing gets done, due to the fact that it’s not conscionable the euphony manufacture that they’re bullying. It’s everybody.&rdquo...