The technicalities of your business conduct do not concern me, no matter who is involved in it. I want to know why you of all people are shutting down a cover artist.

The technicalities and nuances and legacy laws are unfortunately what power the music industry. It can be complex and confusing. Materia is licensing and collecting the music publishing share of this cover, as we do on hundreds of other platforms, and have done for years.

Any artist is welcome to manage, register, and collect their *sound recording* copyrights on YouTube and other platforms. We do this for the hundreds of releases we own and manage -- and we highly recommend that other artists work with their MCN/distributor to do the same.

You are essentially forcing an ultimatum on the entire VGM cover community: sign up to a label and be told what they can and cannot cover, or be crushed.

Crushed...? Our team is literally responsible for the advent of legal vgm monetization and DIY cover song licensing. YouTube is <7% of sound recording revenue. And the idea that 100% of revenue of an unlicensed cover song sound go exclusively to the recording artist is absurd.

... Okay... that sounds a little bit self-aggrandizing and biased.

the idea isn't to have 100% of the revenue go to the recording artist. It's about rev share -- which YouTube literally already enables as an option.

Honestly, I get it, but... it's the way Materia is saying it, right now. Are unsigned cover artists just a bunch of baddies to this label? How did that happen?

the most charitable way i can interpret MC's comments is something like, "Cover musicians need rights managers just as composers do, so a cover musician should work w/ a distributor that will do that"

they should know well that this is WHY we have bad metadata. Because some cover musicians submit their covers to certain unscrupulous distributors who will submit to content ID as if it is an original composition and then hide behind their own FAQ pages.