Music on YouTube benefits unknown artists - but reduces revenues of the big players

(Image: Pixabay CC0) - Music hits that are made available for free by users on YouTube are less in demand on platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music. For the broad mass of lesser-known artists, on the other hand, uploading to YouTube by users can help them gain more attention and thus revenue via more lucrative platforms. This is the conclusion of a team of researchers from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, the Universities of Tübingen and Hamburg, and LMU Munich. Their study was published Friday in the journal Marketing Science . Songs that belong to lesser-known genres or were released a long time ago are also accessed more frequently on streaming services if they were previously uploaded by users to YouTube for free. As YouTube occupies a key position as the world's largest music streaming service, these findings raise questions for the regulation of the market - this was very controversially discussed when the EU Commission Revised the Directive (Article 17) on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. It is important that policymakers carefully consider the potential impact of stricter regulation of user-generated content platforms," said Nils Wlömert, professor at the WU Institute for Retailing & Data Science and lead author of the study.