4 Facts About Indie Labels Making Money From YouTube

It's clear that streaming and YouTube is a huge part of the future for record labels, but monetizing these streams still has a long way to go. Some labels are starting to figure it out, and The Guardian talked to some of the leading indie labels and uncovered some interesting facts. Anyone looking to work in the music industry in the next few years, you should probably be thinking about these things, because things are changing pretty quickly.

Martin Mills, founder of Beggars Group, told The Guardian that 22% of the label group's digital revenues were a result of streaming. He added that the majority of artists on the label earn more from streams than they do from downloads, and that Spotify pays the highest per stream, but YouTube accounts for more streams.

Beggars Group includes 4AD, XL Recordings, Matador, and Rough Trade. The roster includes Adele, Jack White, and The xx.

Mills also shared that Beggars pays its artists 50% of streaming revenues. This isn't the industry standard and all labels handle this differently.

Cooking Vinyl's founder Martin Goldschmidt revealed that on average, the label makes about $5,000 for every 1,000,000 YouTube streams. This varies based on the type of ad (skippable or not, length), the country (only 26 out of 120 countries monetize YouTube views), and the advertiser.

These figures and stories told by artists and labels all give different details, but Richard Leach, digital distribution manager for Cooking Vinyl, explains, "Our revenue is growing month on month at a fantastic rate. It's unhelpful to get hung up on per-stream rates, and it's better to focus on the aggregate figure, which is really healthy."

While Cooking Vinyl's YouTube views have doubled over the past year, their revenue from YouTube has more than doubled. It goes to show that they're starting to figure out how to better take advantage of monetizing strategy.

Ad sales teams like Vevo tend to focus in on one specialty or category (like music), and as a result they can gain a better understanding of the demographics than Google Ads. Because of this, they can bring in a higher rate.

Vevo includes no user generated content, so they know exactly what they're dealing with, and they charge a flat rate per video.

According to The Guardian, some indie labels say that 30% of YouTube ad revenue goes to YT and Google.

YouTube has said in the past that it takes 45%.

40% goes to the record label or owner of the recording, except in cases where the owner can claim that it's an official video, not an unofficial use of the song. In these cases the owner gets an additional 20%.

Songwriters/publishers get the remaining 10%.

Though these are the numbers given to The Guardian, it seems that you get different answers depending on who you ask. In a previous article, The Guardian revealed that a million views only yielded $40 in royalties.

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