PRS For Music continued its battle with YouTube for higher royalties yesterday by lining up high profile songwriters to explain to the press why their collecting society is right to stand firm in its royalty rate dispute with the Google-owned video website.

As you may have noticed Google have pulled premium videos off its UK and German YouTube websites after failing to reach new licensing deals with the two countries' song copyright bodies, PRS and GEMA respectively.

Music bodies being "unrealistic"

Google say the music bodies are being totally unrealistic in their per-click royalty demands. PRS and GEMA argue that, while YouTube may currently be a loss-making service, parent company Google is a multi-billion dollar company, and that if they want to transform YouTube into a quasi-MTV they need to be willing to pay a fair rate for the music that is at the heart of such a business.

At a press conference officially launching the previously reported website www.fairplayforcreators.com, the Chairman of PRS, Ellis Rich, did some tough talking, telling reporters:

"Google, a massive commercial enterprise with profits last year of £3 billion, decided to ride rough shod arrogantly and ruthlessly over the music creators that contributed to YouTube's success.

Maybe we should be calling them 'me tube' because they certainly don't care much about you. PRS for Music is proud to represent every one of our 60,000 members and help them guard their rights and collect the income we believe they are entitled to.

They all deserve fair recompense for their creativity, whenever and wherever it is used by for profit, benefit or advantage. Google's YouTube is a big internet business that thinks it can steamroller over small businesses - and many of our members are very small businesses!"

Artists speak out

Among the songwriters there to voice their support for PRS's campaign against YouTube, was sometime Robbie Williams collaborator Guy Chambers who said:

"Google/YouTube are in effect asking songwriters to give away their songs for nothing. The longer music is available for nothing or next to nothing online, the quicker the demise of the recording industry. Google is manipulating the PRS for Music dispute in a deeply cynical way; to confuse the public into believing that the industry is outdated and behaving in a protectionist manner. Nothing further could be from the truth".

Beverly Knight was also there. She kind of claimed that YouTube was putting its deals with major record companies before the rights of the songwriting community, and that that was unfair, because it meant labels benefited but songwriters did not. She said:

"It's great that the internet allows anyone the freedom of accessing and enjoying all kinds of music easily. However those of us who actually create the music constantly lose out when big companies pay labels to exploit that music. The creators get cut out of the deal when they are not paid royalties. This is entirely wrong. Everyone expects to be paid for their work and musicians are no different".

£11 for Pete Waterman

Pete Waterman was also there, and again told reporters how his YouTube royalties for 'Never Gonna Give You Up', a song he co-wrote and which was watched "over 100 million times" on the video site thanks to the Rick-rolling phenomenon, were just £11, a royalty he'd receive if the song was played just once on BBC Radio Stoke.

It's a good voxpop for the PRS campaign, though there has been quite a bit of discussion in the blogosphere about the reliability of Waterman's claim since he first made it at the outset of the PRS/YouTube squabble, with some adding up the total number of views of the various versions of the Astley song on the video service and getting a figure under 50 million views, and others wondering whether PRS have actually paid out royalties for the period when Rick-rolling was at its peak.

Still, Waterman seem convinced he was right when he retold his story at yesterday's press call, adding:

"Panorama did a documentary on the exploitation of workers in Dubai. I feel like one of those workers, because I earned less for a year's work off Google or YouTube than they did".

The collecting society is after public sytmpathy and relying on fed up music listners deserting youtube for the Google company to break and pay up.

The aforementioned Rich concluded by saying:

"We need support to make big businesses like Youtube realise that they do not have the right to trample over the soundtrack to our lives - it's time for them to face the music and pay a fair price for it".

Additional reporting - CMU Network