Meta, the parent company behind Facebook, recently unveiled a brand new way for content creators to monetize videos containing licensed music. This new feature, called Music Revenue Sharing, aims to share the revenue of licensed music between content creators and music artists.
Meta is hailing the new feature as ‘the first of its kind within the music industry’ and states that it strives to help the site’s content creators ‘access more popular music, deepening relationships with their fans.’ The new service is powered by Meta’s Rights Manager, a tool specifically designed to comb Facebook and Instagram posts for original, copyrighted content. This service will now be an integral part of letting creators earn money from using their favorite tracks in videos.
As with anything, there’s a caveat, though; In order to use licensed music and still monetize their videos, creators must first be eligible for Facebook’s in-stream ads, and meet various standards. These include Facebook’s monetization standards, music guidelines, and community standards.
To be eligible for these services, videos must be:
- Have a runtime of 60 seconds or longer
- Be posted to Facebook
- Contain some kind of visual component (to deter creators from posting blank screens with licensed music)
- Feature samples of music covered by the Music Revenue Sharing service
Facebook now has a dedicated Licensed Music Library where users can explore the musthat the new service covers. The social media platform has also assured users that it will continue collaborating with music rights holders in an effort to expand the current list of covered tracks. Its hope is that this new service will ‘bring creators and the music industry closer together, leading to more authentic connections with fans.’
Should content creators’ videos meet Facebook and Meta’s numerous standards, they can expect a 20% share of the revenue generated by the use of licensed music tracks. This is a fairly low percentage and it stands to reason that many content creators may opt to instead stick to royalty-free music and retain the full 100% of revenue generated.
While the Music Revenue Sharing service is already live globally, only videos delivered to US audiences are eligible for monetization at this stage. The company intends to expand the full scope of the service worldwide within the coming months.
In other Facebook news, the social media platform has vowed to give you more control over your feed. This is likely due to backlash over curated feed content and numerous accusations of Facebook retaining too much control over the content you see on the platform.