Warners returns to YouTube

YouTube welcome back Warners artists:

Music Licensing: It's complicated. Let's face it. But today all of that is beside the point: we are happy to announce that Warner Music Group (WMG)'s artists are returning home to YouTube. Under this new, multi-year global agreement, you will be able to discover, watch and share Warner music on the site. The partnership covers the full Warner catalog and includes user-generated content containing WMG acts.

With Warner on board, we now have artists from all four of the major music labels & publishers together with hundreds of indie labels and publishers on our platform. Warner will also be able to sell their own ad inventory and will use our Content ID technology to claim and monetize user-generated videos uploaded to YouTube by Warner Music fans. The partnership is based on a revenue share generated from the ads on the videos, and this makes good business sense for everyone involved: artists and labels can make money from their videos and the YouTube community gets to enjoy them.

But enough talk... let's get back to the rock. Warner's videos will begin appearing on YouTube in the near future.

That's from the official YouTube blog.

Why might Warner have come back?

Well... the blog entry immediately before the Warners return shows exactly what the label was risking by sitting outside:

We love to brag about successful projects that happen in our community, and so when we heard about DFTBA Records, the label that's all about acts that rose up on YouTube, run by YouTube stalwarts/songwriters Alan Lastufka (fallofautumndistro) and Hank Green (vlogbrothers), we just knew this had to be the subject of a Music Tuesday spotlight. Thus, on the homepage today is a DFTBA showcase, including a premiere of "Live on the Internet" from comedy duo Rhett & Link (cameo alert! a certain rapper appears in the video). You can also hear Hank and Alan talk about why they started DFTBA -- which, by the way, stands for "don't forget to be awesome" -- and experience a taste of their own music.

Oh... and the latest ComScore figures can't have hurt YouTube's case, either. This put Google's share of video viewing at 39.6% in August. The closest competitors - Microsoft - managed 2.2%. Warners was only hurting its artists by remaining aloof.