User-upload platforms shift copyright monitoring costs onto content owners while underpaying them

Evidence

Companies in the social quantification sector use unpaid labor not only to exploit users but to undermine other competitors in the cultural production sector. For instance, Jonathan Taplin points out that YouTube is the largest music-streaming platform in the world, to which users (unpaid laborers) have uploaded practically every song in existence. At the same time, YouTube has relegated the job of monitoring for copyright infringement to the owners of the underlying intellectual property (the record companies). The result is that artists and record companies collect less revenue from YouTube than from other music-streaming platforms, even though their content is played many more times on YouTube than anywhere else. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 216

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the data-colonialism/commercial surveillance frame: unpaid user labor being leveraged against a rival production sector is a structural feature of platform economics, echoing attention-platform debates about who harvests value from user activity. — connects to: Deferred ‘exposure’ and visibility pay most aspirational content creators poorly — Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love:…, 11
• SHARE: The specific irony—record companies earn less from YouTube despite far more plays because they bear the monitoring cost—is a crisp anecdote for someone following music-industry/platform economics.

Broader Connections

• Deferred ‘exposure’ and visibility pay most aspirational content creators poorly #expands (0.85) — Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love, 11