How to get YouTube Revenue from Your Music?
Hello Composers, I wonder if you have any experience of YouTube Revenue services like Adrev or Audiam? 
If you don’t know what this is:
These are services that can track and collect revenue for the use of your music compositions on YouTube videos. So let’s say someone uses your music on a video that explodes and gets millions of views…then you will get some of the ad revenue that video generates.
Sincerely,
Mike
I have not had any luck on Adrev, guess i need to write better music. One thing though is it’s interface is broken with soundcloud and cannot upload from there. Not sure whose side is broken, my guess is Soundcloud.
EDIT: I need to write music that people will stream…and of course… getting the word out is always key!
So the reason for my question and this thread, is that I have no experience with Adrev at all personally, but I watched a video from Alex Moukala where he said one of his tracks was used by a massive YouTuber and that got Alex like 500 dollars every quarter from Adrev…just from that one track!? 
That got my attention for sure, so I want to learn more about this Adrev and similar “YouTube collecting services for music”.
I noticed if I distribute with Distrokid they can automatically add your tracks to Audiam (Adrev competitor)…and I think Tunecore uses Adrev. So it seems you don’t have to go to Adrev directly yourself, but instead simply use a distributor that can add it for you while you at the same time get your tracks up to every streaming service.
Do you know how many views that $500 was for though?
The only numbers I have for comparison is around $50 for 200k views. I’m not sure if these are literal youtube views or click through or something else entirely. I’m honestly not sure how its calculated but from around 20 tracks my income from YT content ID services is pretty low, probably a few hundred dollars per quarter.
I think you’d either need lots of tracks or be part of videos with high million view counts. I’m not sure how adrev works on videos with multiple tracks used as well. I have a track on a video with about 11m views but it uses about 25 different pieces of music.
Hey William, no sadly I have no idea as he did not give any details on which track it was or which video…but I trust Alex, so I don’t think he was misleading in any way. I would assume the video got millions of views to generate that much on Adrev for him.
But hey, better have some chance by being “in the game” than no chance at all right? 
I am always dubious about these companies purporting to get you revenue you deserve. The cynical me thinks there has to be a catch somewhere. In the UK we have PRS to collect royalties for you as well as MCRPS.
I would love if my PRO would collect royalties from YouTube use of my music, but as far as I know…no PRO in the world does this. Which means we need to rely on third party services like Adrev that for some reason has struck a deal with YouTube on this matter.
But please correct me if I am wrong, I am simly trying to learn all this myself haha.
I am also still learning this. However, this article pretty much confirms that PRS in the UK do collect royalties - https://www.prsformusic.com/royalties/online-royalties
Oh man, I am getting more confused the more I learn hahaha. I assume there are different slices of the cake (as the music industry tends to be insanely complex when it comes to dividing all the various royalties).
I will look at Audiam to see how it works. I don’t post a lot with distrokid right now, because I don’t really expect sales or high levels of streaming. I definitely make more licensing in RF for now.
PROs do collect royalties. However, streams on youtube, spotify are not items that are monitored by the PROs. Revenue on Youtube, Spotify, Pandora, etc come from an amount paid per stream. I have less than a dollar in revenue on Distrokid from streams on Spotify, Itunes, and Wheezer. Adrev is free and pays you directly as well for Youtube videos. I am not sure about the youtube content in Distrokid, It seems it is 4.95 per year (per song/album I am not sure about) and they take 20% of the revenue. So it does pay to know where and how to get the income. Adrev is not hard to setup, HOWEVER, it is a pain to upload the files, that is why I am annoyed that soundcloud is not playing well with them right now. (and has not been for awhile…) So in this case my streaming revenue is monitored by Distrokid (insert your music aggregate here… bandcamp, etc…)
You would think in this alleged modern digital age there would be an easy way to do this. I have some time off work after tomorrow is out and hoping to spend some of that consolidating all my revenue streams, outlets etc. I did sack off SoundCloud premium as they would not let me monetise even though I met their requirements.
They offered me, I politely declined. (soundcloud that is) I just did not see the value in their proposition.
I heard YouTube pays license fees to PROs that music can be used there … But I don’t think you get money from PROs when your music is used in a video. You need to register your music with a Content ID service like Adrev or Audiam. I wouldn’t recommend to use music distributors like Distrokid to automatically get your music registered in Content ID because Distrokid takes around 5 dollar per track per year… If you register your music on Adrev yourself you have a 80/20 share of all revenues but this is probably cheaper. At least if you don’t get that much views on YouTube.
Hey Jonathan!
That’s great info, I thought I would be smart to let the distributor automatically add my released to content-ID, but if they take a yearly fee for it that sucks.
I thought that was the case…5 bucks per year per track…no thank you. I will stick with adrev for now. But that is not my main focus when it comes to music production for me. I am not focusing on videos or spotify to make money. If i write a song that pops, great.