YouTube Blocks Music Videos in Germany

Posted on 01. Apr, 2009 by refe in NEWS

Google recently blocked all music videos from YouTube users in the UK, and now it looks like it has done the same in Germany. In both cases the deal breaker was royalty fees that Google deemed unacceptably high. Google’s contract with GEMA – the German royalty collection agency - expired last Thursday and GEMA is requiring royalty fees fifty times higher than even the PRS in the UK. This could cost Google as much as €120,000 per million streams. GEMA did offer Google a slight discount (from €0.12 to €0.1) although it appears to have been in exchange for greater transparency on Google’s part, a requirement the search giant was unwilling to meet.

This is the same issue that has led Last.fm to require membership fees from it’s international users, and why it is considering similar fees here in the US. Ad revenue alone is simply proving not to be enough to bear the burden of sky-high royalty fees. The irony is that while the GEMA and the PRS and claim to be representing composers and songwriters, they are also doing them a great disservice. Their artists are not likely to be happy about having their music videos suddenly pulled from YouTube, which amounts to a huge loss in free publicity.

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