This article is under construction and will be expanded and corrected as soon as possible.
NOTE: Due to recent rampant abuse of the Content ID system, please read the following:
Content ID is a rights management tool, intended for claiming third party videos that use your music. The keyword here is “third party”.
Content ID is a rights management tool, intended for claiming third party videos that use your music. The keyword here is “third party”.
Although Content ID allows you to monetize this third party use as a compensation for the rights infringement, it is not a royalty generating or monetization tool!
Specifically creating your own clips in order to monetize them by exploiting Content ID monetization, especially when “hiding” your music in non-related popular content, is against the intended use of Content ID. Youtube will see this as circumvention of their monetization abuse prevention.
This will result in takedowns of your content and, ultimately, termination of your account with us, as well as Youtube possibly locking you out of your own channel.
What is Youtube ContentID?
We offer Youtube ContentID. In short, this means that we let Youtube make a digital fingerprint of your music, with which YouTube automatically searches for improper use by third parties. Videos uploaded to YouTube by third parties are compared to the digital fingerprint of your music. Once a match is established, this video will be claimed on your behalf.
A policy is then applied on that video, the most common (and also the standard setting) being so-called monetization. This means that the video may continue to exist on Youtube and will not be taken down on behalf of you, but we collect the income generated by that video on your behalf.
This income will then be paid to you at a revenue share of 50/50. This is different from the revshare that you have agreed on for digital distribution, because ContentID requires some manual work from us.
You have no access ContentID yourself, only parties like us can have such a partnership with Youtube. So, despite the lower revshare, you would still earn more than if you don’t apply ContentID to your releases. This in addition to the fact that you immediately establish and enforce your rights worldwide on the Youtube platform.
Facebook also offers a similar system, but it is automatically activated when we deliver your releases to them.
ContentID also ensures that the videos on your own channel are claimed by us on your behalf and generate income. If you don’t want to (for example, because you don’t want any ads with it), we can whitelist your channel or release claims on individual videos.
