Irving Azoff still has a bone to pick with YouTube over the streaming giant’s royalties to artists.
“YouTube is by far the worst offender,” the famed artist manager and entrepreneur said on Friday (Sept. 26) at The Wrap’s TheGrill 2025. “I’m really not fond of when companies take advantage of creators.”
Citing numbers available through Global Music Rights (GMR), the performance rights organization he founded in 2013, Azoff said YouTube’s royalty rates are a fifth of its nearest competitor despite having five times that competitor’s annual revenue. That gives YouTube “unchecked” power when it comes to negotiating with rights holders such as GMR, SESAC, Paramount, Fox Television, Univision and NBC Universal, he added.
“When you get down to the end of a negotiation with them, they call your artists, they call your record companies,” Azoff continued. “They go out and [say], ‘We’re going to take your music down.’”
Azoff has been voicing his opinions about YouTube for at least a decade. In a February 2016 interview with The New York Times, he lambasted the video streaming platform for paying too little to creators and hiding behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) “safe harbor” provision that allowed it to host music videos uploaded by its users. “When you’re dealing with these tech companies,” he said, “they are worth zillions of dollars, more than the net worth of the entire music industry.”
At Clive Davis’ pre-Grammy Awards gala a few days later, Azoff warned the music industry not to “be pacified by lip service about efforts to create paid subscription services.” At the time, music consumption was skyrocketing, industry revenues were at an all-time low, and YouTube’s poorly monetized free streams were competing against burgeoning subscription services. “It’s a system that is rigged against the artists,” Azoff told Billboard in May 2016. “In my years as a manager, I haven’t seen such a serious threat to artists.”
Azoff also lambasted YouTube at the same The Wrap event in October 2016, calling the company “very evil” and citing its use of the Clinton-era DMCA. “We’re at a time, especially in music, when there’s such a lack of respect for intellectual property, and they’re the worst offender of it,” he said.
Since 2016, YouTube has launched various subscription services to complement its core ad-supported free platform, including YouTube Music, which currently has a 10% share of the global music subscription market, according to MIDiA Research. But ad-supported royalties have faltered in recent years, and numerous music industry sources have told Billboard that YouTube Shorts, YouTube’s short-form video format, is likely a factor behind a decrease in music royalties from the video platform.
Music companies aren’t alone in opposing the tech giant. NBCUniversal is currently mired in a licensing dispute with YouTube TV and warned on Monday (Sept. 29) that its programming could be pulled from the platform. “YouTube TV has refused the best rates and terms in the market, demanding preferential treatment and seeking an unfair advantage over competitors to dominate the video marketplace — all under the false pretense of fighting for the consumer,” NBCUniversal said in a statement.
NBCUniversal’s confrontation with YouTube could end up being helpful for music, said Azoff at the event on Friday. “You got to hope at some point something goes on that forces them to come to the party,” he said. “But when you got people like [chairman and CEO of NBCUniversal owner Comcast] Brian Roberts making public statements about it, it’s better. So, I’m more hopeful that something gets done, because it’s not just the music industry that they’re bullying. It’s everybody.”
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