According to people who would be in a position to know, YouTube has offered promotional support to musicians in exchange for those musicians not criticizing the video-streaming site. Honestly, this would seem to be fairly standard (after all, we can't criticize the people/institutions that are cutting our paychecks) but those same people (who wished to remain anonymous) say that YouTube's top musical competitors don't have the same caveats.
As reported by Bloomberg, over the past several months YouTube has given a couple hundred thousand bucks to select musicians to make videos, while also promoting their work(s) on billboards in an effort to mend their complicated and occasionally fractured relationship with the music industry.
YouTube has been agreeing to long-term deals with the three biggest music companies on earth; and they plan to launch a paid music service by March 2018.
Without elaborating on what exactly they meant, one of the anonymous musicians who spoke to Bloomberg about this practice said that YouTube's non-disparagement clause goes beyond simply stipulating that you can't criticize them. That person went on to say that YouTube requires that most (if not all) of their partners agree to those same terms, including people who make original content for their paid service.
Bloomberg also reports that the super popular website has started taking extra precautions in new business agreements after they were caught way the hell off guard when Morgan Spurlock admitted to engaging in sexual misconduct just a few months after they got the rights to release his new movie, a sequel to Super Size Me.
Prior to that, in 2016, nearly 200 artists signed a petition which, in part, called for YouTube to better police copyright violations on their site. Senior YT executives were reportedly quite pissed about that letter, and privately insisted that they were backed by a majority of artists/managers. People familiar with the matter said that major artists like Taylor Swift and Paul McCartney had only added their names to the letter so their record labels could negotiate better deals. YouTube also countered the public rebuke by saying they'd paid out more than $1 billion to the music industry, while simultaneously stepping up their crackdown of copyright infringement.
