According to a report carried by PC Mag, “Friendly Music” is a new online store that will allow users to purchase copyright-protected tracks in the form of a downloadable MP3, is licensed for use indefinitely and costs just $1.99 per song.
The fee authorizes the video producer to “non-commercial, unlimited views rights in perpetuity,” according to RumbleFish founder and CEO, Paul Anthony. The site is officially planned for launch on June 29 and will include as many as 35,000 tracks from independent music. New music is set to be added daily.
YouTube is keen to stay on the right side of litigious copyright holders. YouTube has long asserted itself as being respectful of copyright holders, a position that has no doubt stemmed, in part, from a number of music industry lawsuits surrounding the use of embedded music in user-created videos.
YouTube has driven a loud campaign to promote its approach to respecting the rights of copyright holders. Videos using unlicensed music on the site are deleted, muted, or covered up with ads — which means the launch may go some way to eliminating the awful home-made music which adorns far too many videos.
“Friendly Music has thousands of songs in every genre from artists and labels around the world,” say the companies. “And we add more music every day. It is just a dollar ninety-nine a song, and your video would not get blocked or muted.”
While Friendly Music will continue to operate as its own standalone site, YouTube’s head of music partnerships, Glenn Brown, said that the Google-owned video site will let users know about the service.
“We will be promoting it,” Brown told PCMag, “but we cannot say how.”
While the sheer idea of protecting copyrights seems to go against the fundamental YouTube philosophy, the site did put forth two methods to help users replace songs that were blocked as a result of its woes.
The Audio Swap and Video Editor are both meant to enhance the user experience when copyright issues get in the way. Audio Swap is formulated to allow YouTube users to search through a library of royalty-free songs and add them to videos. As a result of a 2008 licensing deal, this library includes content from RumbleFish.
Friendly Music tracks pull from RumbleFish’s current lists of licensable music. The company assures that “Name Artists” will be added in the very near future, yet for now the list is relatively thin. Video Editor allows users to trim and join clips and add a soundtrack.
This movement is more likely a reaction to the large number of industry lawsuits that emerge as a result of embedded music in user-created videos placed on the free site. At its I/O developer conference last month, Google briefly discussed the prospect of its own music service. Google said it will be able to stream all of a user’s music stored on a PC to an Android phone – as long as the PC is powered up and connected to the Internet.
“It is a capability that is on the chart,” Vic Gundotra, the vice president of engineering for Google, said at the time, though he added that the company had not announced any content partnerships.