The world’s largest music streaming platform is also a search engine and a video platform – YouTube. The Alphabet-owned company, which Google acquired in 2006, holds a 25% share of the streaming music market.
Interview with Tim Devenport, ISNI
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Email | Download
Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora – as streaming music services continue to take market share away from physical product and even downloads, these names are recognized as leading players in the future of the recording industry, yet another online platform towers over them all.
The world’s largest music streaming platform is also a search engine and a video platform – YouTube. According to numerous estimates, the Alphabet-owned company, which Google acquired in 2006, holds a 25% share of the streaming music market. YouTube maintains that 99.5% on the music on the service is matched to rights-holders by its content ID software or removed from the service; indeed, musicians and recording companies earn $1 billion annually in song royalties from YouTube views. Among billions of uploaded files, however, the ongoing and even monumental challenge is to identify performers and songwriters, to reconcile data, and ensure attribution.
Early in 2018, YouTube announced it would become a registration agency for the International Standard Name Identifier, ISNI, the ISO-certified global standard number for identifying millions of contributors to creative works and those active in their distribution. YouTube is the first ISNI registration agency in the music space, according to Tim Devenport, executive director of the ISNI International Agency.
“We think that we can both bring something to this party,” he explains. “We can bring ISNI’s skills in terms of disambiguation and setting up persistent identifiers, and certainly the business case is there for YouTube to actually add this to the other mechanisms that it uses to correctly attribute information, and particularly to musical rights and so on, to its performers and artists.
“Just to give some ideas of metrics, we have something in excess of 10 million ISNIs already assigned to persons and individuals within the database,” Devenport tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “It could well be, we believe, that just the YouTube partnership may result in that figure going up by perhaps 3-5 million over the next couple of years.”
