Warner, YouTube Close To Music Video Deal

Reports are swirling that Warner Music Group and YouTube are close to sealing a deal that would allow music videos from artists such as Green Day, REM, David Bowie, Madonna and other artists back on the video-sharing site; a dispute over licensing rights caused Warner Music to pull music videos by its artists from Google’s YouTube in December.

According to Advertising Age, Warner is also interested in joining Vevo, a music video site YouTube and Universal Music Group are planning to launch later this year.

So what does the deal mean?

Essentially, it means Warner Music’s long list of artists can rejoin the fun on YouTube, where artists from EMI Music, Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group already have deals.  Warner Music will take on the primary responsibility of selling its videos, and YouTube will receive a cut of the revenue. Also, Warner will no longer be entitled to a licensing fee each time one of its videos is played.

The Wall Street Journal reports that potential Warner/YouTube deal most closely resembles the agreement YouTube reached in March with Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, the world’s largest recorded music company by sales and market share.

One key difference, according to these people, is that the deal with Warner, the No. 3 music company, wouldn’t create a freestanding Web site. Instead, music videos would remain on the YouTube.com Web site, which is the world’s most-visited online video destination.

Individual artists’ pages or channels would be redesigned to emphasize things like digital-download sales and links to the artists’ own Web sites. The pages could also be customized for corporate sponsors.

Writing at allthingsd.com, Peter Kafka noted that Warner loses a guaranteed revenue stream in the deal, but, “if its contention about the value of its videos is correct, it will make even more than it did under the old arrangement. Meanwhile, YouTube gets to hang onto “premium” inventory without being locked into the kind of  pay-per-play arrangement that helped drive the site’s expenses sky-high.”

Nobody likes disagreements, especially when it means not being able to see White Stripes videos on YouTube. So the Warner/YouTube licensing deal looks like a win-win, certainly from a music fan’s vantage point: favorite artists back on YouTube + free of charge to enjoy = good times.

Heck, even the artists must be happy. What musician wants their videos banned from YouTube? Perhaps ‘relief’ is more appropriate than ‘happy’ now that Warner’s artists have such a mega, content platform back in play.

Even though both parties have their angles (money play), it’s still good to see the label and YouTube playing nice. And now everyone can go back to spending hours and hours watching video content – this time with all the Warner artists back in the game.

Are you excited to have Warner Music artists back on YouTube?