An agreement between YouTube and the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) will see the former spend between $30 and $40 million on unpaid licensing royalties. The settlement money will be directed to songwriters and publishers who haven’t been properly paid due to YouTube having an imperfect system for attaching credit to content.
YouTube hopes to prevent unpaid royalties from accruing in the future by giving publishers access to its database of songs for which there isn’t enough information. Publishers can fill in the missing data so that royalties are paid. This system offers an alternative to retroactively suing for copyright infringement.
We appreciate YouTube’s willingness to work with us on behalf of the industry to help pay out millions of dollars in previously unclaimed royalties to publishers and songwriters. It is essential that we work with digital services like YouTube — the most popular digital platform for music discovery — to fix the challenge of incomplete ownership information to ensure royalties are no longer unmatched and music owners are paid accurately by the platforms that rely on their work. – David Israelite, CEO, NMPA
