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Nearly 30 years after its release, the music video for No Doubt‘s signature 1995 hit, “Don’t Speak,” has reached one billion views on YouTube. The recent milestone marks the band’s first video — and one of less than 20 released in the 1990s — to enter the Billion Views Club, according to a press release […]
A federal judge on Monday (May 22) dealt a major blow to a lawsuit that claims YouTube enables piracy by restricting access to copyright tools like Content ID, refusing to allow the case to proceed as a class action that could have included tens of thousands of rightsholders.
The lawsuit, filed by a composer named Maria Schneider, claims that YouTube has become a “hotbed of piracy” because the platform provides “powerful copyright owners” like record labels with Content ID to block and monetize unauthorized uses of their content, but fails to do the same for “ordinary owners.”
But in his ruling on Monday, Judge James Donato said that Schneider could not team up with tens of thousands of other rightsholders who she claims suffered similar harm from YouTube’s policies, dramatically reducing the scope of the lawsuit.
Cases can only be “certified” as class actions if the various accusers share similar complaints against the defendant. And in Schneider’s case, Judge Donato said different rightsholders would have very different cases against YouTube.
“It has been said that copyright claims are poor candidates for class-action treatment, and for good reason,” the judge wrote. “Every copyright claim turns upon facts which are particular to that single claim of infringement [and] every copyright claim is also subject to defenses that require their own individualized inquiries.”
Filed in 2020, Schneider’s lawsuit claims that YouTube (owned by Google parent Alphabet) forces songwriters and other smaller rights holders to use “vastly inferior and time-consuming manual means” of policing infringement, allowing piracy of their material to flourish on the platform.
For its part, YouTube says it’s done nothing wrong. In court documents, the company has argued that it’s spent “spent over $100 million developing industry-leading tools” to prevent piracy, but that it limits access because “in the hands of the wrong party, these tools can cause serious harm.”
With a trial date looming next month, attorneys for Schneider had urged Judge Donato to let the case move forward as a class action. An expert retained by her legal team suggested that the class “at a minimum” would include between 10,000 and 20,000 aggrieved copyright owners.
“The Copyright Act does not countenance such blatant disregard of individual artists’ intellectual property rights,” her attorneys wrote. “Class actions were created for this institutionalized misbehavior that relies upon the disincentives and lack of resources for a lawsuit absent collective action. A class action is the superior method through which YouTube’s participation in and facilitation of copyright infringement can be held to account.”
But in Monday’s ruling, Judge Donato strongly disagreed. He said the many individual claims against YouTube would require “highly individualized inquiries into the merits,” including a case-by-case assessment of whether YouTube possibly had a valid license to those particular songs.
“Whether YouTube has a license for a particular work will be a matter of intense inquiry at trial,” the judge wrote. “The answer to this inquiry will depend upon facts and circumstances unique to each work and copyright claimant.”
Monday’s order won’t end the case, but it will now proceed to trial based only on copyrights owned by Schneider and two other plaintiffs (Uniglobe Entertainment and AST Publishing). The lawsuit is scheduled for a June 12 trial, though it’s unclear if that date will be changed in the wake of Monday’s decision.
An attorney for Schneider and a representative for YouTube did not immediately return requests for comment on Monday’s order.
YouTube brought in $6.69 billion in advertising revenue to start the year, continuing a downward trend for the video giant after past quarters of explosive growth during the earlier years of the pandemic.
The first-quarter revenue figure, reported as part of parent company Alphabet‘s quarterly earnings on Tuesday, is roughly a 2.6 percent decline compared to the $6.87 billion in revenue reported during the first quarter of 2022. The video platform previously reported $7.96 billion in ad revenue during the holiday season, falling short of Wall Street expectations and representing an 8 percent year-over-year decline.
In a call with investors, Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said the company was “encouraged by progress” in monetization for YouTube Shorts, which rolled out its revenue-sharing program with creators in February. The executive also said there was “significant ongoing subscriber growth” in YouTube Music Premium and YouTube TV, though the company has not disclosed subscriber numbers.
YouTube is now led by Neal Mohan, the former chief product officer who assumed the CEO role in February after longtime executive Susan Wojcicki said she was stepping down to focus on her family and “personal projects.”
In his first public message released on March 1, Mohan said his top priorities included supporting YouTube’s creators by improving monetization tools, increasing accessibility on the platform and focusing on growth in areas like gaming and podcasting. Included in those areas were YouTube’s short-form offering, Shorts, and its streaming products like YouTube TV and Primetime Channels.
The executive also noted YouTube will continue to contend with an advertising downturn that notably impacted the company’s revenue growth last year. “This is a pivotal moment for our industry. We face challenging economic headwinds and uncertain geopolitical conditions. AI presents incredible creative opportunities, but must be balanced by responsible stewardship. Creators, viewers, and advertisers have more choices about where to spend their time than ever before and platforms like YouTube need to deliver across a range of formats while investing in the policies that protect platforms from real-world harm,” Mohan said in his letter at the time. “As I look ahead to what’s next for YouTube, I’m confident we’ll put our full energy into what matters most for creators and viewers.”
Parent company Alphabet saw modest growth during the first quarter, with total revenue increasing 3 percent year over year to hit $69.79 billion. The company said it took $2.6 billion in charges related to the January layoffs that resulted in 12,000 employees — or around 6 percent of Alphabet’s workforce — losing their jobs.
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
Hailey Bieber is heading from the bathroom to the kitchen. Following the success of her YouTube interview series Who’s In My Bathroom?, the Rhode founder launched on Wednesday (April 12) the first season of What’s In My Kitchen?
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The six-episode installment features the model sharing recipes for her favorite dishes, including chicken wings and an at-home version of her popular Erewhon Skin Smoothie. “What’s In My Kitchen? was a natural spinoff to Who’s In My Bathroom? because our audience was ready for us to stop eating in the bathroom!” Bieber said in a press statement, per The Hollywood Reporter. “I’ve loved cooking and sharing meals with friends on my social channels for years, and I can’t wait to bring this experience to the fans of our network with OBB and HexClad. Creating new formats and IP for my channel has been really empowering, as my team and I get to truly create everything from concept to screen, and I can’t wait for everybody to see what’s next.”
The show will also give back, as Bieber will source her cooking ingredients from Village Market Place from Community Services Unlimited, which works to “address the inequalities and systemic barriers that make sustainable communities and self-reliant life-styles unattainable,” according to their website. Hexclad will also make a donation to the Accion Opportunity Fund, which allows female-owned and POC-owned small businesses in the food industry to leverage $100,000 in microloans.
Watch the first episode of What’s In My Kitchen? below.
As the music industry becomes increasingly conscious of — and vocal about — the challenges of the streaming model, fraudulent streams have become a source of growing frustration. “Every penny that goes to a fraudulent stream is a penny that doesn’t go to a legitimate stream,” says Richard Burgess, president and CEO of the American Association of Independent Music. “Fraudulently increased stream counts can affect recording budgets, licensing deals, catalog valuations and can result in the misallocation of marketing budgets.”
The French government, which recently published the results of a months-long, country-wide investigation into streaming fraud, portrayed understanding the impacts of this activity as an imperative. “The stakes are high in our country as well as in the rest of the world: the development of music services, which can be free and financed by advertising, or paid through subscriptions, as individual or family plans, constitutes a tremendous opportunity for the music sector, after years of a long crisis,” the report asserted. “…Such growth whets the appetites and stimulates the creativity of those who seek to abuse the system.”
“The multiplication of fake streams, that is to say the processes allowing [bad actors] to artificially boost play counts or views to generate an income, is nothing short of theft,” the report continued.
The French study, conducted without data from YouTube, Apple Music, or Amazon Music, found that 1% to 3% of plays were fraudulent, while also noting somberly that “the reality of fake streams goes beyond what is detected.” BeatDapp, a Vancouver-based company that creates fraud detection software for labels, publishers, distributors and streaming services, believes the global level of fraud is higher. “In 2020, estimates were 3 to 10% of all streaming activity was fraud,” the company wrote in 2022. “Today, we confidently say it’s at least 10%, and more in some regions. That equals ~$2B in potentially misallocated streaming revenues this year, and will be ~$7.5B by 2030 if left unchecked.”
So what forms does streaming fraud take? According to Burgess, the practice “covers a multitude of techniques used to increase stream counts or impressions by other than legitimate means.”
Here are three of the most common:
Bots
Discussion of streaming fraud often turns quickly to bots, which Burgess defines as “automated software that can be used to generate views, streams or interactions.” To detect bot activity and prevent it from affecting royalty payouts, companies build models that trawl streaming data and look for listening patterns that appear anomalous: BeatDapp likes to discuss an example of finding tens of thousands of accounts all streaming the same 63 songs.
“If I’m trying to push numbers up, I’m going to do it across streaming services in a subtle fashion this way,” BeatDapp co-CEO Andrew Batey says. “Spread it across a lot of accounts and multiple platforms, and you can drive a significant number of plays with no one looking.”
Click Farms
Streaming services are looking for suspicious play patterns that don’t reflect human behavior. Fraudsters are aware of this, so they try to camouflage their activity in ways that appear human. One method is to get actual humans to press Play through what are known as “click farms.”
Eric Drott, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin who has written about streaming fraud, describes these as “enterprises concentrating low-paid, precarious workers who are engaged to perform the sort of rote, repetitive tasks that keep the flows of digital capitalism moving: creating social media accounts, moderating content for platforms, clicking online ads, liking or rating items and, of course, generating plays on streaming services.” Accounts that stream music 24 hours a day or stem from a smartphone that never moves or dips below 100% power could be evidence of click-farm activity.
Imposters
A third prominent form of fraud identified by Burgess involves impersonating creators by uploading a version of their song to streaming services and illegally collecting creators’ legitimate royalties. This is a common problem faced by artists who are having a moment on TikTok, for example: Imposters post a version of the TikTok hit on streaming services under a slightly different name, aiming to divert some streams (and hopefully royalties) their way.
“It happens to every single viral artist,” says one manager who shepherded a viral act to a major-label deal last year. There are many distribution companies out there, and managers say that some of them have lax oversight of what’s being uploaded to the DSPs through their platforms. This means artists and their teams have to keep close watch on streaming platforms and issue takedowns when they find imposter versions.
Post Malone and Swae Lee‘s “Sunflower” music video officially surpassed 2 billion views on YouTube on Thursday (March 9).
Originally released in the fall of 2018, the song was part of the soundtrack for the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and also ultimately made the tracklist for Malone’s 2019 studio album Hollywood’s Bleeding.
The music video borrows a multitude of scenes from the family-friendly movie to spell out the origin story of a young Miles Morales even as the rappers take turns crooning, “Callin’ it quits now, baby, I’m a wreck/ Crash at my place, baby, you’re a wreck/ Thinkin’ in a bad way, losin’ your grip/ Screamin’ at my face, baby, don’t trip.”
“Sunflower” became Malone’s third career No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — after the 21 Savage-assisted “Rockstar” and “Psycho” featuring Ty Dolla $ign — when it reached the summit of the chart for a single week at the start of 2019. Meanwhile, it was Lee’s very first chart-topper and also scored nominations for record of the year and best pop duo/group performance at the 2020 Grammy Awards.
In November, the two rappers had another reason to celebrate their massive song after it achieved the record as the highest-certified single in the history of the Recording Industry Association of America at 17x Platinum.
Just a few weeks ago, the video for Posty’s 2015 breakout track “White Iverson” joined the Billion Views Club on YouTube, becoming the rapper’s fourth video to do so after “Sunflower,” “Rockstar” and “Congratulations” featuring Quavo — the latter of which is inching closer every day to the 1.5 billion mark.
Revisit the “Sunflower” music video below.
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Maino has once reminded the Hip-Hop community he is always on that type of time. The rapper recently choked Buba100x during an interview.
As per Complex the Brooklyn, New York MC had to put hands on yet another individual. Last week the YouTube personality pulled up on him and asked for an interview. Right away things were very awkward when Buba100x asked Jermaine if he could borrow his chain. Mind you the piece in question features a photograph of his recently deceased mother. Nevertheless, he took the request in stride but let the prankster know he should do better with his questioning. “See now you just chatting, I gave you time now you just chatting.”
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Next up he was going to ask the Lobby Boy to rate on a scale from one to ten how badly he would beat him up but before he could even finish his question Maino grabbed him by his neck and pinned him down on a table. “I just told you, it’s not just a stupid video don’t play with me” he said with a lot of bass in his voice. By the faces of utter shock on the other people there it seemed to be a very real situation but Maino says it was all staged.
In a sit down with Angela Yee he explained “It was all part of the prank. It was fake. I wanted to make it look real.”
You can view the clip of him allegedly manhandling Buba100x, with much ease by the way, below.
Susan Wojcicki announced in a blog post on Thursday that she will step down as CEO at YouTube after nine years, saying she wants to “start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about.”
Taking over at the streaming media giant will be Neal Mohan, longtime chief product officer and Wojcicki’s No. 2 since 2015. She said she’ll “still be around” and will assist in the CEO transition and take on an advisory role across YouTube parent Alphabet/Google.
In a separate statement to Vox, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin said Wojcicki, who famously rented out her garage to the duo in 1998 and became their 16th employee a year later, holds a “unique place in Google history and has made the most incredible contribution to products used by people everywhere.”
A timeline for the CEO transition was not given. Read Wojcicki letter to employees, later posted on the YouTube blog:
Hi YouTubers,
Twenty-five years ago I made the decision to join a couple of Stanford graduate students who were building a new search engine. Their names were Larry and Sergey. I saw the potential of what they were building, which was incredibly exciting, and although the company had only a few users and no revenue, I decided to join the team.
It would be one of the best decisions of my life.
Over the years, I’ve worn many hats and done so many things: managed marketing, co-created Google Image Search, led Google’s first Video and Book search, as well as early parts of AdSense’s creation, worked on the YouTube and DoubleClick acquisitions, served as SVP of Ads, and for the last nine years, the CEO of YouTube. I took on each challenge that came my way because it had a mission that benefited so many people’s lives around the world: finding information, telling stories and supporting creators, artists, and small businesses. I’m so proud of everything we’ve achieved. It’s been exhilarating, meaningful, and all-consuming.
Today, after nearly 25 years here, I’ve decided to step back from my role as the head of YouTube and start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about.
The time is right for me, and I feel able to do this because we have an incredible leadership team in place at YouTube. When I joined YouTube nine years ago, one of my first priorities was bringing in an incredible leadership team. Neal Mohan was one of those leaders, and he’ll be the SVP and new head of YouTube. I’ve spent nearly 15 years of my career working with Neal, first when he came over to Google with the DoubleClick acquisition in 2007 and as his role grew to become SVP of Display and Video Ads. He became YouTube’s Chief Product Officer in 2015. Since then, he has set up a top-notch product and UX team, played pivotal roles in the launch of some of our biggest products, including YouTube TV, YouTube Music and Premium and Shorts, and has led our Trust and Safety team, ensuring that YouTube lives up to its responsibility as a global platform. He has a wonderful sense for our product, our business, our creator and user communities, and our employees. Neal will be a terrific leader for YouTube.
With all we’re doing across Shorts, streaming, and subscriptions, together with the promises of AI, YouTube’s most exciting opportunities are ahead, and Neal is the right person to lead us.
For all the YouTubers I’ve had the privilege to work with, you have done so much to make this platform better over the years. You created the largest creative economy the world has ever seen, enabled entirely new forms of art and storytelling, and supported millions of creators and artists to reach new audiences—all while investing in responsible growth so that this brilliant community of creators, artists, viewers, and advertisers could not only co-exist but thrive together. Thank you!
As for me, in the short term, I plan to support Neal and help with the transition, which will include continuing to work with some YouTube teams, coaching team members, and meeting with creators. In the longer term, I’ve agreed with Sundar to take on an advisory role across Google and Alphabet. This will allow me to call on my different experiences over the years to offer counsel and guidance across Google and the portfolio of Alphabet companies. It’s an incredibly important time for Google—it reminds me of the early days—incredible product and technology innovation, huge opportunities, and a healthy disregard for the impossible.
And beyond that, I’ll still be around, so I’ll have a chance to thank the thousands of people from all across the company and the world who I’ve worked with and learned from. But for now, I want to thank Sundar for his leadership, support and vision over the years. I also want to thank Larry and Sergey for inviting me on what has truly been the adventure of a lifetime. I always dreamed of working for a company with a mission that could change the world for the better. Thanks to you and your vision, I got the chance to live that dream. It has been an absolute privilege to be a part of it, and I’m excited for what’s next.
Thank you for everything,Susan
The Scorpions‘ iconic video for their 1990 power ballad “Wind of Change” has officially entered the YouTube billion views club. The black and white clip that opens with a haunting whistle over images of fans holding up sparklers is credited by some with helping to hasten the end of the decades long Cold War between the U.S. and former Soviet Union.
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In between footage of singer Klaus Meine crooning and a massive crowd holding up lighters, the video sprinkles in images of tanks rolling, economic disasters, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest in China and the fall of the Berlin Wall. “I follow the Moskva down to Gorky Park/ Listening to the winds of change/ An August summer night, soldiers passing by/ Listening to the winds of change,” Meine sings on the track from the band’s Crazy World album that is the band’s first video to pass the billion mark.
The power ballad that peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 tally and became the best-selling single by a German artist was written during a 1989 visit to Moscow; the previous year the band became the second-ever Western rock band to play in Russia when they performed in Leningrad on their Savage Amusement tour.
They returned in August 1989 for that summer’s Moscow Music Peace Festival — which also featured Ozzy Osbourne, Cinderella, Motley Crue, Skid Row and headliners Bon Jovi — where they said they were inspired by seeing thousands of young Russian fans cheering for a West German rock band. When the Berlin Wall fell in Nov. 1989, “Wind of Change” became a kind of unofficial anthem of German reunification.
The song was the subject of an eight-part 2020 podcast of the same name hosted by Patrick Radden Keefe that looked into the rumors that American intelligence officers were secretly behind the writing of the tune as part of an effort to end the Cold War. And while the band has never confirmed or refuted the rumors on the record, in the series an unnamed former spy told journalist and author Keefe that it was not out of the question that the CIA dabbled in subversive songwriting.
“In fact, I’d be somewhat surprised if they weren’t still doing that sort of thing today,” the source said in the podcast. “I’ll leave it to you to wonder which acts that might be.”
Check out “Winds of Change” below.
Just before the start of his previously scheduled trial, Jose Teran, who was accused of running a YouTube scam with a partner, has accepted a plea deal in which he has admitted to counts of conspiracy, wire fraud and transactional money laundering for his role in one of the largest royalty scams in history. In his plea, Teran admits to stealing over $23 million in royalties from Latin artists that he admits now he had “no lawful rights to monetize or otherwise control.”
Teran and his business partner, Webster Batista Fernandez, operated their scam under the business name “MediaMuv” and were originally indicted by a federal grand jury in Arizona on Nov. 16, 2021, on 30 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft. The scam was the subject of a Billboard investigation. Batista took a plea deal on April 21, 2022, in which he admitted to one count of conspiracy and one count of wire fraud. Batista now awaits sentencing, which is currently scheduled for March.
Teran’s plea agreement echoes much of Batista’s. Both pleas say that the MediaMuv founders “discovered there were songs of musicians and bands on the internet that were not being monetized.” So they began uploading the recordings to YouTube as MP3 files, claiming to own or control the rights. Between 2016 and 2021, Teran and Batista falsely claimed royalties from songwriters and artists ranging from independent creators to songs recorded by global stars like Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, Prince Royce, Julio Iglesias and Anuel AA.
Under the name MediaMuv, Teran and Batista signed a contract with YouTube to use its content management system (CMS), which rights holders use to claim copyright ownership and the ensuing royalties. “We falsely claimed that MediaMuv owned over 50,000 songs and further sought access to YouTube’s CMS in order to obtain royalty payments for these songs,” Teran said in his plea. In addition, the duo entered a contract with AdRev, a rights management company owned by Downtown Music Holdings, “to assist in administering the music [they] fraudulently claimed to own.”
Billboard’s investigation uncovered that YouTube royalty-claiming scams like MediaMuv’s are more common than is generally believed, but Teran and Batista’s scheme was particularly brazen in terms of both scale and style.
Sources who work closely with the platform say YouTube scammers typically just claim small fractions of songs they suspect have not been claimed properly and might go unnoticed. This is especially common on the publishing side, where some compositions have so many songwriters that ownership and royalties are far more complicated than they are for recordings. But MediaMuv often claimed 100% of royalties for master recordings or compositions.
Both Batista and Teran admitted in their pleas that they sent three falsified contracts with companies that “purportedly” managed artists to AdRev and YouTube “for the purpose of deceiving [them] into allowing [MediaMuv] to continue [its] fraudulent operation” in July 2017. According to Teran’s plea deal, these three forged management contracts were provided to support MediaMuv’s assertion that it controlled a vast Latin music catalog.
The plea deals also say the duo did not act alone. Both mention that they hired “over five co-conspirators” to help them find new music to fraudulently claim and, in return, those co-conspirators were paid “a portion of [MediaMuv’s] royalties.” Names are not revealed in these documents, but other court documents tied MediaMuv to a network of people who seem to have benefited financially from Teran and Batista’s scheme, including Batista’s then-wife, who purchased a house in Phoenix in cash with money from a MediaMuv-associated bank account, according to a court document filed by prosecutors.
The house she purchased, along with six bank accounts, a Tesla, a BMW and a plot of land, are all listed in Teran and Batistas’ plea deals as items they agree to forfeit.
Though the duo is ordered to “make restitution to any victim” of their crimes, one of the businessmen who represented multiple MediaMuv victims told Billboard in August he doesn’t “expect to get it all back. I’m sure they spent a lot of it on cars and travel and stuff.”
In a statement to Billboard, a spokesman for Downtown Music Holdings says the company is “pleased by the latest developments in the MediaMuv criminal case, as both defendants have now pleaded guilty and admitted their role in this complex fraud scheme. This case sends a strong message to other potential bad actors that this kind of fraudulent activity in our industry will be investigated and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
Representatives for Teran and YouTube did not respond to Billboard’s request for comment.
Teran’s sentencing is set for April 17, 2023.