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.

And yet, whether or not it's distributors submitting metadata to societies (or via MLC's fantastic new DURP process), metadata *exists* and competent rightsholders ensure they are collecting what is theirs. Even ignoring bad actors, the amount of bad metadata is astronomical.

So, instead of reducing the chance of the proliferation of bad metadata by using pre-existing revenue sharing options, you want to increase the number of claims (and increase the prevalence of bad metadata).

I may not be the best educated on subjects like this, but I can tell when someone's just not reading the room, including myself.