Cellist disagrees with YouTube Music Key over rule #4,080

It's been a few months since Google launched its YouTube Music Key service, and now we may be finding out how it plans to keep the digital shelves stocked. Musician Zoë Keating blogged last week complaining that YouTube threatened to block her music -- she plays "the cello and the computer" sampling her own sounds as part of the performance -- from streaming unless she signed a 5-year agreement licensing her work for the new service, among other changes. So what's going on? (Other than the usual explanation.) According to Keating, she uses ContentID to track and, if she chooses to, get paid when someone uses her music in their videos. The new contract Google is offering is all-encompassing when it comes to monetization, so to keep ContentID her music will be included in both the free and premium services, the entire catalog will have ads on it, and new music is required to come to YouTube at the same time it arrives anywhere else.

Zoë Keating:

She states the worst part is that the Google rep told her if she did not sign the new contract, her entire channel would be blocked. A representative for the service told us that is not accurate, and that "Any artist who agrees to our basic Terms of Service will always be able to share videos on YouTube." In an update to the original post Keating is adamant that there was no misunderstanding of what "blocked" meant, and provided her own transcript of the call. She maintains that she was told she'd need to start a new YouTube channel under non-music partner terms, and that the rep agreed the measures were harsh.

What will happen next is unclear, but Keating's reason for being an independent artist is "because I didn't want a bunch of men in suits deciding how I should release my music", while Google isn't budging in negotiations. Similar issues with a number of labels including independents delayed the initial rollout of what eventually became Music Key -- hopefully licensing issues don't become a regular problem for what we called "the most complete music offering on planet Earth."