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SIXX:AM have turned their album promo and tour announcement into an opportunity to speak about artists rights and fair payment from YouTube. <\/p>\n
The band has made this letter available to the media supporting their position:<\/p>\n
DON\u2019T BE EVIL, YOUTUBE<\/p>\n
We recently completed our fourth album called Prayers For The Damned, in our singer\/producer James Michael\u2019s recording studio. We are a lucky band, grateful to have all had success prior to the creation of Sixx:A.M. Nikki came from M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce, DJ played guitar in Guns N Roses for the past seven years and James has had a successful career as a writer and producer. Releasing an album and being part of a tour going on sale, allows us to use the promoters marketing money to create a larger platform to get our message out, and having a record company that generates publicity gives us an opportunity to speak up about issues we think are important\u2014specifically the crisis with the music business and YouTube.<\/p>\n
Sixx:A.M. has always been vocal about artists\u2019 rights. We stood with Taylor Swift when she spoke up about the absence of royalty payments to artists by Apple Music. The band has also long been an advocate of new artists, and Nikki has featured them heavily on his radio show, Sixx Sense, and via his social media. We chose today to speak up about how YouTube unfairly pays artists and labels an estimated 1\/6 of what it\u2019s competitors, Spotify and Apple pay and why this must be addressed, along with a revision of the antiquated Safe Harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).<\/p>\n
YouTube\u2019s parent corporation, Google, has the second highest market capitalization in the world and its two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are worth a combined $75 billion, and total 2015 revenue of Google was $75 billion. The total annual revenue of the global music business, in comparison, is less than $15 billion. We have deep respect for Google\u2019s spirit of innovation and YouTube\u2019s contribution to the field of technology and entertainment, in fact the data we are citing comes from Google itself, but the facts don\u2019t lie: Our large community of hardworking artists is being exploited to make a very small percentage of people extremely rich.<\/p>\n
This is an important issue to us. We are the lucky ones, like so many veteran artists, who came up in an era where there was much more income from record sales. Today, streaming is a fraction of income from that time. This is not about us. We are speaking up for the current and future generation of musicians who must be compensated fairly for their hard work. We would not have had Prince, Blondie, Bruce Springsteen, Ice Cube, Taylor Swift, or many other artists without a system to support and nurture them.<\/p>\n
We support technology and its ability to bring music to more people around the globe. All we ask, is for ALL artists to receive fair pay. When Google first started, its corporate motto was \u201cDon\u2019t Be Evil.\u201d That motto has since changed to \u201cDo The Right Thing.\u201d It\u2019s time to live up to your corporate mottos, Google and YouTube, and invest in the future of music. <\/p>\n
Nikki Sixx
\nJames Michael
\nDj Ashba
\nSIXX:A.M. ANNOUNCE THE \u201c#REASONTORISE\u201d CAMPAIGN<\/p>\n
YOUTUBE \/ GOOGLE FACTS<\/p>\n
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\nYouTube is owned by Google, which has the second highest market
\ncapitalization in the world.<\/p>\n
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\nGoogle\u2019s two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are worth a
\ncombined $75 billion.<\/p>\n
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\nGoogle\u2019s original corporate motto was \u201cDon\u2019t Be Evil\u201d.<\/p>\n
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\nYouTube pays an estimated 1\/6 of what Spotify and Apple pay to its
\nartists.<\/p>\n
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\nMusic is the top subscribed channel on YouTube with 93 million
\nsubscribers.<\/p>\n
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\nArtists have little to no control over whether their content is
\ndistributed by third parties on YouTube. YouTube is an open system,
\navailable to everyone, as opposed to a closed system like Spotify and
\nApple, i.e. if an artist chooses not to have their content on Spotify,
\nit cannot be uploaded and distributed by somebody else (somebody who is
\nnot the rights holder). On YouTube it can be uploaded and distributed by
\nanybody at any time.<\/p>\n
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\nIf unlicensed content is uploaded to YouTube, YouTube is protected from
\nliability by the Safe Harbor provision in the Digital Millennium
\nCopyright Act (DMCA).<\/p>\n
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\nThe Safe Harbor provision requires artists to serve YouTube a take down
\nnotice for EVERY SINGLE instance of unlicensed uploads. For example, if
\n1 million people unlawfully upload a Taylor Swift song to YouTube,
\nTaylor Swift must serve YouTube with 1 million separate take down
\nnotices.<\/p>\n
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\nBecause it knows that artists will not wish to serve near infinite take
\ndown notices, it offers an alternative \u2013 a license with YouTube. These
\nlicenses provide a certain level of fingerprinting technology to
\nautomatically remove unlicensed content, but these systems are not
\nperfect and unlicensed content still makes its way onto the platform.<\/p>\n
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\nYouTube has developed technologies to identify licensed content uploaded
\nby an unlicensed user. This technology is not fool proof and does not
\nprevent all unlicensed uploads. These technologies are only available to
\nusers with official YouTube licenses, which pay artists and content
\nowners significantly less than other services like Spotify, Apple Music
\nand Pandora.<\/p>\n
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\nArtists are faced with a choice: Either license content to YouTube for a
\nfraction of what should be paid and enjoy limited protection from
\nYouTube\u2019s content ID systems or be forced to issue take down notices
\nfor every single infringement on the system.<\/p>\n
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\nIt is very clear: YouTube uses its market power and corporate muscle to
\nextort content creators into licensing their music for well below what
\nits worth, thus driving down the entire value of music worldwide.<\/p>\n