Three major record labels are reportedly threatening to boycott YouTube – The music industry’s big names apparently feel they’re getting a bad deal from the video-streaming service. The music industry is a contentious and combative one, always on the verge of war, it seems.
According to reports in the New York Post, the three giants of the music industry, Universal, Sony and Warner, are completely unhappy with YouTube to make money. The companies feel that the site does not take seriously the fact that it has to do with the financing of their content. Another complaint stems from how Google maintains complete control over everything from ad policy to sales channels.
The report states that the three major companies are seriously considering the possibility of a "nuclear explosion", which in reality means that they could resort to removing music from the site's catalogs.
This is obviously easier said than done, given that YouTube is the dominant player in the ad-supported media-streaming space. One way to break YouTube's dominance would be to support its rivals, including Snapchat and Vessel, and that's something the three giants are considering.
The story behind the story: In the run-up to the launch of Apple Music, there were rumors that the Cupertino-based company was trying to take over the record labels and thus cut off the free music streaming thread on YouTube. It was claimed that Apple had gone so far as to offer to make up for any loss of licensing revenue in the case of Universal.
Combine this with recent reports that Facebook is also working on some kind of music-in-video offering, and the picture starts to become clearer.
