YouTube Pays for UK Music Licenses

This week YouTube struck a long-term agreement with British music royalty societies to license 10 million pieces of music for an undisclosed flat fee.

From scads of TV shows debuting online to the joint venture between News Corp. (NWS) and NBC — now called Hulu — readying itself for launch, until this announcement YouTube had been all but absent in recent high-profile online video deal-brokering.

When you hit a dry spot, you turn to your base, and YouTube has a good record doing deals with music labels, among them Warner, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, and EMI. Of course, the music industry has everything to gain from a new revenue source. And it doesn’t hurt that YouTube is offering up a flat fee.

That’s not to say the music industry is reluctant to go to court over copyright. UMG in particular has been especially litigious against video-sharing sites, as well as successful — it drove Bolt out of business. U.S. music publishers also recently joined Viacom (VIA) and others’ lawsuit against YouTube.

The YouTube-UK music deal will focus on high-traffic videos. Andrew Shaw, of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, told the Financial Times that his organization will screen the top 5 to 10 percent of clips. “The long-tail is not worth calculating,” he said. Another representative of the alliance noted the UK deal was more permanent than the ones that have been signed in the U.S.

The deal means more spending for YouTube. The site, which is owned by Google (GOOG), just this month made its first major advertising deployment. Ads are being used only sparingly, but one of the places they’re showing up in is in music videos.