YouTube Content ID for musicians and producers

How music gets into Content ID

YouTube describes a digital aggregator, or distributor, as a company that helps distribute your music to streaming platforms. Its page on music aggregators says your audio files and metadata need to be delivered to YouTube for your music to be published there in full. YouTube's preferred distributors must offer Content ID rights management among their services. An Official Artist Channel also needs at least one release delivered by a distributor or label.

So there are three common routes:

• Your distributor's Content ID option. Convenient if it's included, but check what it covers, how disputes are handled and what share it keeps.
• Your label or publisher. Common for signed artists; the label manages the claims.
• A Content ID service. Useful if your distributor doesn't offer Content ID, if you want a team to handle disputes and find the copies matching misses, or if your music lives mostly in videos rather than on streaming platforms.

One track, one manager

If two parties claim more than all the rights to the same recording in the same country, YouTube calls it an ownership conflict. Monetization of claims based on that reference is generally postponed until the conflict is resolved, so a conflict usually means less money for everyone until it's sorted out.

Before you sign up anywhere, list where each release is distributed and whether Content ID is switched on there. If it is, either opt that release out with the distributor first, or sign up only the music it doesn't manage, such as music videos, beats you sell directly or unreleased material.

What qualifies

YouTube's eligible content rules ask for exclusive rights to everything in the reference. For musicians that means:

• Qualifies: music you composed and recorded yourself and haven't signed away, and music videos you own.
• Doesn't qualify: covers, remixes of other people's recordings, karaoke, sound-alike recordings and remasters; music licensed to you without exclusivity; sound effects, soundbeds and production loops; anything released under Creative Commons or a similar free license.
• Think first: beats sold on non-exclusive leases. A reference for the beat matches every song an artist built on it.

Shorts have their own rules. When someone adds your song from the Shorts audio library, YouTube creates a special Content ID claim. The Short's creator can't see that claim, so they can't dispute it. Music added outside YouTube's tools is handled with standard claims. YouTube's page on managing Shorts as a rights holder has the details.

How it works with Aegis

Aegis claims re-uploads and other uses of music and videos you own, through Content ID. You submit a channel or playlist link, and we add your tracks as references in bulk. We handle the work that follows: exclusions for samples or parts you don't own, disputes, false claims and overlapping references. We also look for the uploads automatic matching misses, because re-uploaders often speed up, cut or re-render a track to avoid it. Your earnings are broken down by asset and by claim.

Music producers already use it. "We were missing out on so much money until Aegis hit us up and explained that we could monetize third-party videos using our content," says Magestick Records on our homepage. "Since then we are claiming about 30,000 videos."

If you'd rather license your music to the channels that use it, an Aegis license page lets them request a license. Your claim stays on their upload and the revenue is shared on terms you set. For the bigger picture, see how independent creators get Content ID and what to do when someone re-uploads your video.