With all the talk about music streaming and if it’s good for artists. I feel contentID is just as problematic. No one talks about how it’s not perfect, at least that I’ve seen or experienced.

ContentID is the thing YouTube has that looks to see if your song is being used in videos. The main selling point is- earn money by collecting ad revenue from videos using your music. Simple right? It can also stop people that use your music and tell them to take it down.

All this is done through third parties.

My problem is, it seems to just be accepted they will serve you well. No questions. They don’t ask you what’s okay and what isn’t. They report back and tell you what you made. And that’s all I’ve really seen. If you need to deviate from this system, that’s where it becomes a hassle.

I release my music under creative commons so originally I thought I had no use for this. Then a year or so ago some company or person I had no affiliation with began sending take down notices to video creators telling them to pay them for using my music. Saying they owned it.

I started getting emails from the video creators who were rightfully confused about this. They were asking if we were doing this, which we were not.

After disputing this company’s claim I had to add our music to contentID in order to have ownership and stop it from happening again. So I did.

You can’t just sign up yourself to do this. It can only be done through “YouTube approved” services. I’m not sure what the approval involves but I didn’t really question it.

Our music has been distributed through 2 services over the years. One for our earlier albums and a second that we started using not to long ago. Both offer YouTube as an option so I just tuned it on.

What I wanted and what I should be able to do in my opinion, is approve people that are using the creative commons license properly. Sort of like “white listing” those accounts from being contacted. I found out this isn’t really possible, or at least isn’t easy.

The first company we used for distribution pretty much told us that they wouldn’t do that and we would just need to turn off contentID. I found that odd.

Why would we not have the ability to control this? It seems like the old school record label model.

Our current distributer at least got on the phone with me and tried to talk about what we could do. We had to come up with a work around to whitelist accounts, like I wanted.

While I was happy that he took my concern seriously and worked with me to fix it I still have to contact someone else, tell them the info of what I need done and wait for them to get back to me every time it comes up.

I’m an indie artist. I get that doing this for large established acts could be a daunting task and probably more people are abusing the use of the music in that situation. But Individual artist expect to have more control over what they make. Fans that get these messages aren’t necessarily aware it’s not you directly telling them no. They might even be turned off by this and you could lose them as fans.

So i ask, why isn’t this access given to approved artists? Why only companies that you are forced to work with just to use it?

That’s a real problem that I think should be addressed.

Can you do this? Am I just not aware of it? If so, then it needs to be easier for musicians to know how.