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Business News Deals Digital Labels & Publishers
TuneCore and Believe confirm partnership with YouTube around Shorts
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 28 May 2021
DIY distributor TuneCore and its parent company Believe announced earlier this week a new partnership with YouTube around its TikTok rivalling Shorts service, which it began rolling out in the US in March following an initial pilot in India.
Like TikTok and Instagram Reels, the aim of Shorts is to make it easier for users to create and share short-form videos, with access to a library of music clips to sync into those videos a key part of the mix. Which means as these services roll out, the platforms need their music industry partners to pump loads of musical clips into their audio libraries. Artists and labels working with TuneCore or Believe will now be able to push clips into the YouTube Shorts platform.
Although services like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are all licensed and therefore revenue generating for the music industry, more attention to date has been put on the way that having a musical clip go viral on one of these platforms causes a spike in listening for featured tracks on more conventional streaming services. That’s partly because some of the licensing deals around these video-sharing services are lump-sum advance deals, so payments are not actually linked to plays. And also because the premium subscription services still pay higher royalties.
With YouTube Shorts, of course, videos can be directly linked to any tracks or artists they feature on the YouTube subscription music service and the wider YouTube platform. As TuneCore and Believe explained earlier this week. “When creators use a song clip for their short video, the music is linked to the artist’s full length song, music video and bio on YouTube proper”, they say. “Viewers are able to go directly to the artist’s videos on YouTube as well as to the artist’s YouTube channels”.
Confirming TuneCore artists could now push clips into the YouTube Shorts library, the distributor’s co-head, Andreea Gleeson, says: “TuneCore is THRILLED to partner with YouTube in introducing YouTube Shorts to the platform’s robust creator community. Just as TuneCore democratised music distribution, short form videos and social media are levelling the playing field for music discovery, turning everyday fans into tastemakers and giving them the power to make songs into hits”.
Meanwhile, Believe’s President of Label & Artist Solutions, Romain Becker, adds: “The advantage we are bringing to Believe and TuneCore artists is clear – fans can immediately connect to artists whose music they like without leaving the platform, thus allowing music to be discovered organically”.
