Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stressed the importance of video content for future growth of the social network more than once. The company has since been diverting focus on becoming a major video streaming giant by surfacing relevant video content in the news feed. It is now looking to further its interests by bringing record labels on board with licensing deals.
The social networking giant has been trying to negotiate a deal with record labels since the beginning of 2015. And to successfully do that, it has been working on an anti-piracy tool that will prevent licensed content from freely being shared on Facebook. This will complement the already existing Rights Manager tool and secure copyrighted music even for user-generated videos. This will enable the company to position itself as a viable competitor to YouTube, with a massive ~2 billion user base.
Recently, executives from Facebook met with industry negotiators, music publishers, and trade officials at the pre-Grammy awards party to discuss their plans for the future. Bloomberg, citing sources privy to the situation, says the social media giant has doubled down on its efforts to secure music licensing deals from music publishers. Talking about the same, David Israelite, president of the National Music Publishers Association, says,
We’re hopeful that they[Facebook] are moving towards licensing music for the entire site.
According to the report, Facebook isn’t directly looking to bring music videos onto their platform and into the user’s news feed. Instead, it is looking to tread down the path taken by YouTube and enable users to include popular music clippings into their video creations. This music will most likely be provided for free to everyone, who can use them without fears of their video being taken down due to claims of copyright infringement. It could provide you with a library of songs to choose from at the time of uploading the video onto the platform.
The company’s commitment to video streaming was reiterated at their recent quarterly earnings call, where Zuckerberg talked about plans for monetizing the stream in coming weeks. He said people are currently gunning for shorter, crisp content like YouTube instead of longer Netflix-like content. It is already getting people hooked and bringing in revenue by showing mid-roll ads in live video as well. Further, Zuck also adds,
We’re focusing more on shorter form content to start. I see video as a mega trend. Over the longer term…people will experiment with longer forms of video as well as all kinds of different things. But quick, snackable clips are the primary focus for the foreseeable future.
But who does it help — the user or the music publisher? This move from Facebook will enable a win-win situation for both. Currently, there is no policy regarding the fair use of licensed content on the social platform. And angered users have to face the wrath of infringement bans on their favorite compilation videos. This deal will enable users to make use of any music content in the background of their videos without having to worry about video removal — under certain restrictions, as always.
As for music publishers, they’ve consistently been scouting for more avenues to bring in a larger share of money from online services. They are currently heavily involved with YouTube and other music streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, and others. This partnership will enable the music industry to push their content to a larger audience and attain higher sales. And also a larger chunk of profits due to the social network’s growing advertising business — which might’ve stagnated but will get a boost with this deal.
