Music Business

Irving Azoff Pens An Open Letter To YouTube: “The root of the problem here is you.”

azoffWhen you manage Christina Aguilera, the Eagles, Van Halen, Steely Dan, Maroon 5, Bon Jovi and more, what you say carries weight.  So while his disagreements with YouTube are not new, Iriving Azoff's just-penned open letter castigating YouTube in response their recent blog post is making waves.

Dear YouTube,

Your attempt at "Setting the Record Straight" through a post on your "creator blog" last month did exactly the opposite: It was obfuscation to divert artists’ attention from the fact that YouTube hides behind the DMCA’s "safe harbor" provision and pays artists a pittance.

You say that music matters to YouTube. There is an old adage about actions and words. If YouTube valued music, then it would allow artists to have the same control which YouTube grants to itself. YouTube has created original programming. Those programs sit behind a “paid wall” and are not accessible for free unless YouTube decides to make them available that way. If a fan wants to watch the YouTube series “Sister-Zoned,” that fan has to subscribe to YouTube Red for $9.99 a month. But the same does not apply to music.

Thus begins Irving Azoff's open letter to YouTube, and the super-manager is just getting warmed up.

If music matters to YouTube, then why not give musicians the same choice you give yourselves? Taylor Swift should be able to decide which of her songs are available for free, and which are part of a paid subscription service. Or she should be able to opt out of YouTube if you won’t give her this choice.

Content Control and Take Down/ Stay Down

Azoff also takes on two music industry hot button issues – YouTube's claim that it can't control what is uploaded and the industry's demand that once a song or video is taken off of YouTube by request, it should never be allowed to be upload again.

…if you are going to continue to force artists to notify you when an infringing song is on YouTube, once an artist tells you that she wants her song taken off YouTube, you should keep it off. When the artist sends a “take down,” it should be a “stay down.”

Before you tell me that you can’t control what is uploaded to YouTube, let me say it seems clear that YouTube can control the content on its platform when it wants to do so: It controls its own series programming, and it limits offensive content like pornography. It certainly monitors what people are listening to on YouTube and provides that information to advertisers.

Azoff concludes:

But the root of the problem here is you: You have built a business that works really well for you and for Google, but it doesn’t work well for artists. If you think it is just the labels and publishers who are complaining, you are wrong. The music community is traditionally a very fractured one, but on this we are united.

Read the full letter on ReCode

 

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6 Comments

  1. Greed ! Greed ! Greed ! Every piece of music should be available on the Internet. Paid or free (with revenue coming from advertising). And artists should be paid – but perhaps not as much as they used to be ? Or – Dear Artist: let’s make a deal – stop charging us $ 40 for a t-shirt at your concerts or $ 30 for a poster. And $159 per ticket. Or $ 300 for a VIP package where I can have a picture taken with you ?
    It is all about greed, Irving ! I know, I know…you , and your artists, have made a lot…but you need more. Understood….greed is everywhere.

  2. There are so many musicians on YouTube who can’t command $40 for a T shirt or $159 for a Ticket. And as traditional products like CDs and even downloads have fallen by the wayside, musicians have a much smaller pie to split with other musicians, manages, agents, producers, road crew, sound technicians and the triad people necessary to sustain a modest career. Meanwhile, Google execs, employees and shareholders make lots of money from the efforts of musicians. So when you talk about greed, I can only marine it’s Google you’re referring too.

  3. Lester, stop being such a luddite and realize that all the pro-piracy, free BS was just that. BS. People got to earn a living and feed their families and the people you’ve hurt the most can afford it the least, the little band that could sell $100k in CDs a year and pay three or four guys minimum wage.
    Don’t you understand why they charge $40 for a T-shirt or $150 for ticket, because you stole their ability to sell recordings. So basically your generation screwed it for everyone. We went from $75 tickets and buying ten or twenty CDs a year to having some collection of digital singles on a playlist and playing two or three times as much for concerts and paying scalpers.
    Yeah. We’ve come a long way; in the wrong direction.

  4. This is the same Irving who sold an Eagles record exclusively to that paragon of music retailing, Wal-Mart.The music retailing community,RIP, complained and was given the option of going to wal mart and buying some or look stupid for not having it. So now you know how it feels to get screwed by a business decion, Irv.

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