Bloomberg reports that Facebook is in negotiations with record labels and music publishers in order to grant their users permission to use songs in their videos. Facebook has been fairly consistent in its efforts to compete with YouTube and the likes in regards to videos. They have already introduced ads in between videos in order to help publishers to make money as well as Watch, the company’s standalone platform for watching shows.
Way back in 2016, Facebook had shared that users watch around 100 million hours of videos every single day. The numbers have probably gone up by a huge margin by now and this can also be judged by Facebook’s struggle to improve its video content to prevent users from going to YouTube.
Bloomberg says that Facebook is already paying singers millions of dollars to license their content for use for videos. A former YouTube executive Tamara Hrivnak is doing the negotiations to further enhance the deal with singers from Facebook’s side alongside former Warner/Chappell Music Publishing executive, Hrivnak. They are doing this in a hurry so they don’t have to takedown user videos because of copyright infringement. Facebook will come up with a system later to identify videos which have songs whose singers Facebook hasn’t paid or hasn’t authorised the video creator to use.
Facebook wants to rival YouTube in terms of revenue from advertising from video content. They will most likely consider paid content as well to rival YouTube Rival which has remained exclusive to the West for now. It is unclear when Facebook will make the official announcement regarding this so treat all this with skepticism.
