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YouTube may finally loosen its rigid rules around copyrighted music

Anita George
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YouTube video creators could one day have the option to use copyrighted music in their videos and still earn money on their videos.

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According to a YouTube video posted on Tuesday by the Creator Insider YouTube channel (a channel that shares updates from the “YouTube Creator technical team”), YouTube is currently testing giving its creators the option to include “copyrighted content” from the platform’s music industry partners. Not only that, but creators are also expected to be able to earn money on these videos.

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And according to a YouTube Help article on the matter, this access to copyrighted music option is a current “feature experiment” that YouTube is still working on and is only being tested “with a limited set of creators” right now. More information about this feature is expected to come out “in the coming months.”

Getting demonetized on videos has been a constant struggle for creators on the YouTube platform over the years — a pretty stark contrast to other social media platforms.

If all of this sounds familiar to you, you’re not alone. YouTube isn’t the only platform trying to allow its creators to use copyrighted music in their videos. Facebook is doing it too. Just last week, Facebook launched its own Music Revenue Sharing program that allows its creators to still earn revenue on videos in which they added licensed music. Facebook’s Music Revenue Sharing program lets creators earn a 20% revenue share if they use licensed music (from Facebook’s music library) in their videos.

Now that YouTube is now working on letting its own creators have access to copyrighted music, it seems more and more likely that this recent push from social media platforms to encourage their users to create more original content isn’t going away anytime soon. At least not while TikTok continues to succeed with its constant flow of original videos, that are often shared on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

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Anita George
Anita George
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Anita has been a technology reporter since 2013 and currently writes for the Computing section at Digital Trends. She began…
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