Creator Music: YouTube launches music licensing marketplace

at the beginning of the month, YouTube announced an innovation for creators on its platform called Creator Music, a marketplace for acquiring music licenses — the service was first announced in September 2022. The new option works as a paid music library and is currently only available to YouTube affiliate program users in the US.

Currently, if a creator creates a video with a song that doesn’t belong to them, all money from the video revenue goes to the owner of the song, whether it’s an artist or a music label. Including this is a constant complaint from several youtubers.

From now on, US users will be able to choose songs that allow revenue sharing, in addition to the ability to pay to purchase licenses for songs that are commercially available. In the first case, the creator takes all the revenue, and in the second case, the user and the track owner choose to split the sums collected from the video’s ads.

YouTube CreatorMusic

“We look forward to launching” [do Creator Music] “Google’s streaming platform is set to monetize creators in the US in the coming weeks and continue to explore expansion to more countries in 2023.”

Creator Music offers several songs broken down by collections, genres, and “moods”, and it’s even possible to filter tracks by budget. When selecting a track, the user sees the cost of licensing or, in some cases, chooses to share the revenue with the owner of the song. After accepting the terms of the contract and purchasing the license, simply download the track and add it to the video.

Anyway, it’s important to note that YouTube will continue to offer a library of free tracks. Set the budget filter to “$0” and search Creator Music itself. The company said it plans to expand the new option to other countries in 2023, but there are no estimates yet.