Partners In Rhyme and many other royalty free music libraries have been having a lot of problems recently with a situation created by Audiosparx (a royalty free music library) and GoDigital Media Group (monetizes media used in youtube and elsewhere).
Sometime last year GoDigital offered Audiosparx the chance to join their Adshare program. The Adshare program utilizes YouTube’s Audio Match ID feature to monetize any video that has music that matches the audio in GoDigital’s database.
Audiosparx joined the program and submitted 15,000 royalty free music tracks to the GoDigital database. Again, these are royalty free music tracks and Audiosparx and GoDigital were wanting to earn “royalties” off of this music (I still don’t understand the logic behind this at all).
The main problem with this though is that this same music is also being distributed by many other royalty free music libraries throughout the internet and Audiosparx does not have an exclusive agreement with any of the composers involved so when Audiosparx does something with the content that is owned by these composers their actions end up effecting the business and reputations of other royalty free music companies.
So, in October, Partners In Rhyme and other music libraries started receiving customer complaints that videos that included legally purchased music were being tagged in their YouTube account as possibly containing copyrighted material owned by GoDigital Media. The videos would then be monetized by GoDigital with Adsense ads and the owner of the video would be denied the right to monetize the videos themselves with their own ads.
Partners In Rhyme had to hire lawyers and send a registered letter simply to find out what was going on but we were finally told that Audiosparx had submitted this music into the GoDigital database.
We checked with our composers who also had material in the Audiosparx library and they had never heard of GoDigital and had no idea their music had been placed into this system and they confirmed that they had not given expressed permission to have their music placed in the GoDigital system.
We made GoDigital and Audiosparx aware of the mistake they had made and Audiosparx apologized and withdrew from the Adshare program.
GoDigital however still has much of the content in their system and is still earning revenue off of content that they have no permission to have in their database.
They say they are trying to remove the content but it is somehow YouTube’s fault now and they are not able to delete the content from their end for some reason.
I am simply posting this explanation so our customers are aware that the problem is being dealt with and to contact Partners In Rhyme (or any other music library that you have purchased royalty free music from) to get GoDigital’s false ownership notices removed from your YouTube videos should they appear.