YouTube’s emerging strategy, to pay revenue on pirated music

Google Inc.’s YouTube has announced a deal with Wind-up Entertainment, an independent label, to pay it a share of revenue from advertising beside pages carrying video with Wind-up’s songs in the background.

It is notable because it provides a glimpse at YouTube’s emerging strategy for compensating record labels, many of them pissed off at YouTube’s slowness to arrive at a solution for stopping piracy. Many users upload vidoes with copyrighted music playing the background. Now that Google can identify the songs with signature technology (yet to be fully announced), even the songs are pirated, this appears to be a workable resolution.

The deal covers more than 225 songs. Wind-up’s artists include Evanescence, Seether, Finger Eleven and Scott Stapp. The exact revenue share was undisclosed, so it is difficult to know how smart a deal this was for Wind-up.