YouTube Says Its SESAC Contract Expired Without a Deal — Adele, Nirvana, Kendrick Lamar, Britney Spears & More Unavailable
Photo Credit: YouTube
This weekend YouTube claimed that its SESAC contract expired without a renewal, resulting in some of the most popular music being pulled from YouTube and YouTube Music.
Searching for music from Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Britney Spears, Green Day, Kanye West, Burna Boy, and many more stars simply returns an error. “Video unavailable,” the error begins. “This video contains content from SESAC. It is not available in your country.”
YouTube told DMN that its licensing deal with SESAC expired this weekend without renewal. “Our music license agreement with SESAC has expired without an agreement on renewal conditions despite our best efforts,” the YouTube Support account on X/Twitter told a frustrated user. “For this reason, we have blocked content on YouTube in the US known to be associated with SESAC—as in line with copyright law.”
SESAC is a performance rights organization that has been around since 1930. It currently licenses the public performance of more than 1.5 million songs on behalf of 15,000+ affiliated songwriters, composers, and music publishers. In 2017, SESAC was acquired by the private equity firm Blackstone. It’s unclear how long contract negotiations for YouTube have been ongoing—but for now SESAC-represented content is blacked out in the United States.
What makes the situation worse is that not all works appear to have been blacked out. The Verge reports that Kanye West’s song “Power” is blocked, but the music video version plays just fine. An unnamed source speaking to Variety about the issue claims it could be a negotiating tactic on YouTube’s part, as the actual SESAC licensing deal does not expire until next week. This wouldn’t be the first time YouTube has attempted to strong-arm a rights agreement.
In 2017, YouTube pulled music in Finland while negotiating witih the local copyright society Teosto. That happened around the same time as the Finnish Independence Day celebration, leaving Finns unable to listen to performances of their national anthem on YouTube. The result was lots of anger directed at Teosto for the removals—but not much redirected at YouTube for the removal in the first place.
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