It's a great idea -- one of many we've deliberated with our partners, distributors, subpublishers, and administrators over the years. Ultimately, there's enough invalid/incomplete metadata out there, and we'd rather focus our efforts in resolving it, not adding to it.

It absolutely gets confusing, if only for the misnomer "publisher" between game and music industries. On the distribution (sound recording) side, many fingerprinting services will allow video game music to be submitted, or require monetization to be disabled.

We're calling this the Indie Video Game Music exception: larger rightsholders of franchises remain unaffected, in part due to nonparticipation in music industry defaults. Who is affected are independent composers who retain their rights. Platforms do not allow them to get paid.

ok, I appreciate this, but this is vague & indirect. Are you trying to say, "Indie game devs cannot publish to content ID even though they are the game publisher of their works, in contradiction to YouTube's stated rules?" That would be clear, direct. but there is an issue:

1) if true, then how would anyone get a content ID claim for UT and DR, and why would you take responsibility for such? (e.g., why wouldn't your FAQ say, "it's not us claiming, because *we cannot*") 2) given that you do have claims, that doesn't explain why no revshare

Nice questions. It's a generalization, so how about "Indie composers who retained the copyrights to their sound recording and music publishing copyrights CANNOT deliver their soundtracks to Content ID via an MCN or distributor and WILL NOT get paid by YouTube."

1. (a.) Because cover songs. Distributors deliver metadata to YouTube, PROs deliver to YouTube. Each party wants its share for a recording. Here's a partial metadata sheet that PROs have provided for a popular MEGALOVANIA cover. Materia is the only display party.

1. (b.) bad actors. We have resolved 100+ cases of people reuploading original UNDERTALE music as theirs. That metadata stays in the system, and takes years to purge.

2. Materia Music Publishing only collects music publishing (sync/perf/mech/lyric) on YouTube. These are royalties exclusively allocated to composition rights holders. (cont'd)

2. (con'td) Between Art Tracks, sound recording claims, and monetized uploads (for unlicensed/non-claimed/unmanaged copyrights), recording artists have variety of ways to collect sound recording shares via distributors and MCNs.