00:00You're one of the few people in the... I feel like over the last decade the music business went from hating YouTube to liking YouTube.
00:07You're one of the few people who still sees it as a big part.
00:09What rock have you been living on?
00:13You talk to the labels and they are very excited about how much money they seem to be getting from YouTube now.
00:19No, listen, when GMR had its last negotiation with YouTube, the labels were all calling me saying,
00:27let them take everything down, right?
00:30We're standing behind you, you know.
00:32Believe me, the YouTube problem is nobody stands up to them.
00:36The bullying continues.
00:38I mean, I had a conversation with someone in the know recently after I shot off my mouth at another one of these gatherings recently.
00:44And he called me up and someone in the know said, I'm going to give you a statistic,
00:49which I wasn't even going to bring up here today, but you started it.
00:52Basically, in fact, Colbert has more people watching him than David Letterman at his peak.
01:01And the economics to CBS are 10% of what the Letterman economics used to be.
01:07And why is that?
01:08That's because YouTube doesn't pay on music royalties.
01:13They pay on their on their same service as a Spotify or an Apple or an Amazon.
01:18Their royalty is one fifth of the of the highest paying of the other ones.
01:24And they just get away with it because they're YouTube.
01:27I mean, it's the classic definition of a monopoly.
01:30And, you know, maybe maybe something happens.
01:32Maybe it doesn't.
01:33But, you know, everybody, not just the music business.
01:36But, you know, I've watched my friends in the movie business and the TV business have, you know, let them get away with it, too.
01:41You know, I hear about, you know, oh, I took that show down and where ratings went up five percent.
01:46But the art but the artist was mad.
01:49So we had to put it back up.
01:50You know, they somehow they've been very clever.
01:52They've built a big monopoly.
01:54But, you know, for the 50 billion dollars I think they made last year, they could just pay a little more.
02:01You know, and it's you know, they they will bully a network, an artist, a performing rights society, a publisher, a label.
02:10It's across the board.
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