YouTube inks deal with Kobalt, reveals it’s paid $2bn to rightsholders

AMRA, the music rights collection society acquired by indie publisher Kobalt, has signed a major global deal with YouTube. 

Covering more then a 100+ territories (excluding the US, Canada and all of North America) the deal enables the company to collect music royalties on videos published by the site.  

AMRA’s deal is looking to generate a greater return for the licenses issued to YouTube for their artists and writers. Excluding other collection societies, the profitability and outlay for collecting royalties by AMRA will be streamlined and designed to resolve the value chain and income for artists.  

Kobalt founder and CEO Willard Ahdritz told Billboard.biz that the industry "can’t spend $5 to collect $1 of royalty revenue in every country."  

The key to this new renegade of royalty equity apparently will lay in its superior technology when compared to other CMOs. The singular operative system of one collection agreement is a relatively untouched concept. Both YouTube and Kobalt are suggesting this solo agreement will allow less fingers in the pie which in turn will mean more revenue for the artist.  

In the past, YouTube has required separate deals with numerous CMOs on a territory-by-territory basis to license catalogues and repertoires of artists globally. AMRA is propositioning that the new technology will somehow be able to uniquely monitor and trace the songs that are played via video streaming in real-time.  

Ahdritz told Music Business Worldwide that “Many creators are missing out on digital revenue without even knowing it. Our relationship with YouTube has always been about creating the most efficient and transparent path for income flow to artists.” 

YouTube Global Director of Music Partnership Christophe Muller told Music Business Worldwide: “We’ve generated over $2 billion in revenue for the music industry in the last few years alone, and we’ve long worked with Kobalt to help creators get paid. Our deal with AMRA takes this work another step forward to ensure that artists, songwriters, and publishers get the maximum value from YouTube.” 

With the $2bn comment gaining a lot of interest lately, concerns have been spiking over the number’s accuracy. Whatever the figure, deals like this are generating more and more push as the veil is slowly being lifted on the reality of transparency when it comes to streaming.