YouTube Pulls Music by Big Name Artists in Latest Licensing Dispute

You may have found some audio tracks missing from YouTube clips over the last couple of days, including music by Adele, Green Day and R.E.M, among others.

This is due to a licensing dispute with the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers (SESAC), which has not renewed its partnership with YouTube, which is set to expire shortly.

But it hasn’t expired yet. Yet, even so, YouTube is already pulling music by SESAC artists, and displaying an error message to users.

So why is YouTube preemptively cutting off SESAC musicians?

According to Variety, the move may be a negotiating tactic on YouTube’s behalf, as it looks to strengthen its position.

As per Variety:

“SESAC is far smaller than [other performing rights associations] ASCAP and BMI - with approximately 30,000 members and 1.5 million compositions while ASCAP has nearly 800,000 members - but as the caliber of artists affected by the block shows, it represents a comparatively large percentage of the marketplace.”

So it seems that YouTube may be looking to get the jump on negotiations by removing the music, in order to then prompt SESAC artists to pressure the organization into working out a deal.

Which YouTube remains confident will happen:

“We have held good faith negotiations with SESAC to renew our existing deal. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we were unable to reach an equitable agreement before its expiration. We are in active conversations with SESAC and are hoping to reach a new deal as soon as possible.”

To be clear, publishers hold more power in the music industry, and it’s the publishing groups that are likely to heap pressure on SESAC as a result of these removals. So it might actually be a brilliant tactical move by YouTube, to get the deal it wants, and the expectation would be that this will be resolved shortly, with the selected artists only gone from the app for a short time.

But there is also a chance that it could drag out, in the same way that Universal’s removal of music from TikTok carried on for several months amid tense negotiations.  

I don’t think that SESAC holds the same level of power in this respect, but for now, the music of several major artists is missing from the app in the U.S.