Not a new topic for regular readers here but one thats been steadily plugged by a frustrated recording industry.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/14/youtube-why-musicians-are-angry-at-worlds-most-popular-music-streaming-service/With the money from CDs and digital downloads disappearing, the music industry has pinned its hope for the future on online song streaming, which now accounts for the majority of the $7.7 billion U.S. music market.
But the biggest player in this future isn’t one of the names most associated with streaming – Spotify, Amazon, Pandora or Apple. It’s YouTube, the site best known for viral videos, which accounts for 25 percent of all music streamed worldwide, far more than any other site.
Now, YouTube is locked in an increasingly bitter battle with music labels over how much it pays to stream their songs – and at stake is not just the finances of the music industry but also the way that millions of people around the world have grown accustomed to listening to music: for free.
I have no idea why Google or one of the other multibillion dollar companies dont just simply buy the rights to a raft of back catalogue material and then sell it online using a micro payment policy, many such small payments would earn them back a vast sum of money and they would both enrich themselves and the recording artist(s) whilst delivering the cheapest way to actually hear the music to the public, they already have the platform in hand to undertake this so why not test the waters by buying up a few of the cheaper rights holding entities and test the market ?
