Why YouTube Is Bad for the Music Industry
More teenagers listen to and discover new music on YouTube than on the radio and iTunes, as the site becomes an online outlet for today’s biggest hits.
Statistics and Impact
More than 60 percent of teens said YouTube is a place they go to when looking for new music, according to a recent survey by Nielsen. In addition, 56 percent said they also look to the radio, while 53 percent go to iTunes and 50 percent said they get their tunes from CDs.
The video streamer has surpassed traditional methods for listening to new music and is a large platform for artists, but its surging popularity isn’t a good thing for the industry.
Challenges Faced by the Music Industry
“The accessibility of music has seen tremendous expansion and diversification,” said Nielsen’s senior vice president, David Bakula. “While younger listeners opt for technologically advanced methods, traditional methods of discovery like radio and word-of-mouth continue to be strong drivers.”
The Role of YouTube and Licensing Issues
One of the reasons YouTube has become an outlet is a large licensing deal Google struck with artists and record labels. Artists now get paid when their music is streamed on the site, and YouTube recoups the money by running short ads in front of those videos. However, one problem with this arrangement is a number of users upload songs when they don’t own the rights.
Impact on Artists like Taylor Swift
For example, the official lyric video for Taylor Swift’s new single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” has more than one million views on YouTube and runs with an ad in front of it. However, several other uploads of the song on YouTube have amassed hundreds of thousands of views that are not running with ads, and are likely not part of the revenue going to artists and record labels.
Now, let’s not all cry for Swift — she’s doing just fine. Her song is number-one on iTunes and her full album will likely share the same fate when it releases in October. The strong presence of her new song on YouTube speaks to its popularity, but it does little to help her or label’s bottom line. In fact, it devalues her music greatly. This doesn’t hurt someone like Swift, who is a superstar with a strong fan base that will buy her music, but it really hurts smaller artists whose songs get streamed on YouTube 10 times more than they’re ever purchased.
The radio as a means for discovery of new music is great for artists. Stations pay to play the music, people hear it and if they like it, they demand to hear it again. As a result they go and buy the CD at the store or on iTunes. However, YouTube has now emerged as an alternative. If someone hears a song they like on the radio, they can now go home (or on their smartphone), search it on YouTube, bookmark it and listen until they’re sick of it and then move on to something else. This shift in listening habits hurts the music industry in many ways.
The listener never paid a thing to hear that music, and even if the artist received money from YouTube for it, the practice sets a bad precedent in people’s minds that music is free, and it’s disposable. This is an ideology record executives have fought since Napster, one of the first illegal ways to download and share songs launched over a decade ago.
Thanks to decreased prices and organized digital market places, many people still enjoy buying CDs, building their collections and then going back and revisiting it later. These are the people who most artists target. However, the “YouTube” generation of music listeners flies in the face of this idea. It turns popular songs into nothing but popular web pages, and as one fades, another pops up in its place and listeners can simply click on to the next.
Conclusion
This isn’t an argument that YouTube is single-handedly going to destroy the music industry. In many cases, artists upload their own songs and videos for free and even popular bands can gain increased exposure on the site. In fact, projected numbers for Taylor Swift’s new single are extraordinary. The track is on pace for nearly half a million downloads for the period ending Aug. 19, which would make it the biggest sales debut for a digital song by a woman in history, according to Billboard.
That’s pretty impressive, but it’s nothing when you consider the song has already been listened to more than five million times since it hit YouTube two days ago. It makes you wonder how many would have translated into sales if so many people weren’t content to just stream it off YouTube until they got bored with it and moved on.
