Universal Music Hijacks Indie Artists YouTube Videos

The world’s largest music corporation, Universal Music Group, has been running advertisements alongside an original YouTube video that features a music track that Norwegian musician Bjorn Lynne created.  UMG has been monetizing his music, and Bjorn is not too happy about that.

Automated bots detect and report millions of alleged infringements without human intervention, so this process has its flaws.  YouTube does allow copyright holders to upload their work into a fingerprint databse so matching content can easily be detected, but this can result in flaws too, where original artists are targeted over their own work.

This is what happened to Bjorn Lynne who had two of his videos hijacked by Universal Music Group (UMG) which has been running ads alongside his work.  A “Copyright notice” was sent to the YouTube video uploader communicating that his video “contains music owned by UMG” and then put advertising on the video.  Any guess where the advertisement money goes to?  It’s paid to UMG.

Apparently UMG has the rights to an audiobook that uses Lynne’s music track as background music as long as the license fees are paid, however, UMG entered the audiobook in YouTube’s Content-ID system, and as a result they hijacked the ads on the original video.  What made matters even worse is that UMG rejected Lynne’s dispute through YouTube afer he explained the situation.

This ultimately means indie artists will need to be prepared to go through the YouTube appeal process to get your videos free, even if it may be a scary process for some.  YouTube may use strong language warning you that you may face legal action and/or get your YouTube account shut down, but you can ultimately win and get your music freed as Bjorn Lynne succesfully did.