Warner Music Removes Its Videos From YouTube as Licensing Talks Stall

It is about to become a little more difficult to watch music videos by Madonna, You must login or register to view this content. and Kid Rock.

Unable to reach new licensing terms, the Warner Music Group has demanded that thousands of its videos be removed from You must login or register to view this content., which is owned by You must login or register to view this content.. Warner Music’s videos, the source of a billion views on YouTube, gradually began disappearing from the site on Saturday, although many remained online Sunday evening.

Music video streams may be a new battleground between Google, which wants to expand its video advertising business, and media companies, which expect to be fully compensated for their online content.

The dispute highlights the outsize popularity of music videos on YouTube, the world’s most popular video-sharing Web site. Six of YouTube’s 10 most popular videos of all time are music videos; the measurement firm TubeMogul says musicians and record labels are responsible for at least eight billion views on the site.

“YouTube owes much of its popularity, and ad revenue, to the fact that a user can find almost any music video there,” said David Burch, the marketing manager for TubeMogul.

In a blog post on Friday, YouTube notified its users about the removal of Warner Music content — including user-generated videos that use Warner music — and said it would continue to work with labels and artists to build “user-friendly licensing arrangements.”

In a statement, Warner Music said it “simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide.”

Warner Music and the other major record labels — Universal Music, You must login or register to view this content. BMG and EMI — reached licensing pacts with YouTube two years ago. They receive a small per-stream fee for each video viewed on YouTube and a share of the advertising revenue.

Disagreements about whether the labels should be paid in advance or after the videos are viewed have contributed to the tension between Warner and YouTube.

Warner’s deal with YouTube expired “many months ago,” a spokesman for Warner, Will Tanous, confirmed. The other labels are all thought to be negotiating for new licensing pacts, although representatives for those companies did not respond to requests for comment on Sunday.

Digital revenue, including electronic song downloads and ad-supported music video streams, is increasingly important to the labels as sales of physical CDs continue to diminish.

Warner reported $639 million in digital revenue for the fiscal year that ended in September. Less than 1 percent of that was generated by YouTube’s ads and fees, said an executive close to Warner Music who requested anonymity because the company doesn’t disclose details about individual agreements.

“If we don’t get this business model right, it’s going to be a lot harder to fix down the road,” the executive said.

Warner is expected to continue distributing music videos with the other Web sites it has licensing arrangements with, including You must login or register to view this content. Music and You must login or register to view this content.. The videos will continue to appear on the artists’ Web sites as well. Listeners are likely to find them the same way they have for years: by typing the name of the artist or song into Google’s search engine.

if this happens with all publishers, then youtube won't be very popular anymore. Some of the videos i've made have been removed cause they have their music in it.