Rick Beato is Right to Rant About Music Copyright Strikes

Go Beato, go!

For 15+ years, Saving Country Music has been on the warpath against the completely ludicrous intellectual property regime that disallows even a small snippet of music to be featured in a podcast without draconious repercussions, including removing episodes, and deleting entire accounts, while not offering any reasonable alternative solutions to the issue.

On YouTube videos, creators can freely filch copyrighted photos and other people’s videos virtually free of ramifications. You can take an entire 2 1/2 hour film, impose it over a background, and upload it to YouTube, and usually avoid any problems. But feature a barely audible 8 1/2-second clip of music underneath audio dialogue, and you could have your entire podcast career evaporate overnight.

Music labels have been leaving major opportunities to promote their catalogs and performers on the table with their punitive copyright claims that make it impossible to feature music on music podcasts and other platforms. And instead of trying to build a system where perhaps there’s more reasonable revenue sharing or other opportunities for artists and songwriters through these podcast platforms to promote their music, it’s the punitive measures of record labels that eliminate these opportunities in lose/lose scenarios.

Music video podcaster Rick Beato with his massive 5 million-plus subscriber base finally got fed up with it, and posted a rant on Tuesday, August 19th about this, and, it’s a thing of beauty.

“I hate making these videos, but I really need to because it seems the only thing that ever gets done is when you talk about this stuff,” Beato starts off. But one of the nauseating things about this issue is that we’ve been talking about it for going on two decades, and still nothing is getting done about it. Saving Country Music posted about this issue in 2024, and in 2020, and as far back as 2010, with no real movement on the issue.

Luckily though, Rick Beato has a much bigger bullhorn, though he has brought up the issue before to no avail, though not in such a dedicated and forceful manner.

Beato’s specific beef is with Universal Music Group, who is the most notorious actor for bringing these heavy handed claims against song clip uses that clearly fall under the fair use clauses of American copyright law, let alone are being brought against a guy who operates a massive music platform that promotes artists. But since there’s rarely humans making any of these decisions and it’s automated by bots, they don’t understand these claims are against Universal Music’s best interests.

“I’m doing interviews with people and playing the music that they either wrote or recorded, or they produced,” Beato explains. “You need to play people music to talk about it. That is the definition of fair use. These are interviews with people about their careers. Why are these record labels wanting to take down content about artist that have records on their label? What sense does that make?”

“Give it a rest,” he continues. “My God. If I didn’t fight these three claims, my channel would get taken down with my 2,000 videos. Is that ridiculous? It’s ridiculous to me. And they’re for interviews.”

People continue to ask, “Why doesn’t Saving Country Music has a podcast?” Because what’s the point of having a music podcast when you can’t feature music? In fact, after over a decade of refusing to start one, I finally did, music free. What happened? About a dozen episodes in, someone took out a claim, and not only were all the episodes deleted, so was the entire account, even though no music even appeared on any of the episodes. I was given absolutely no recourse to fight whatever false claim had been made.

For the record, Saving Country Music’s Country History X podcast remains live. But it’s been difficult to pursue it, knowing it could summarily disappear at any moment. People have lost thousands of episodes and videos over this issue. Meanwhile, you can use extended song clips on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. It has become an excellent way to promote songs and artists. These networks facilitate this music sharing, and credit the artists for their work.

The music industry continues to so colossal fail the artists and catalogs they represent, and the fans they’re supposed to serve with this current system of how podcasts are handled. If everything changes today thanks to the Rick Beato rant, it would still be 15 years too late. But at least it would happen. The powers that be in the music industry need to recognize that the power base in media is moving to podcasting, and they need to make music available to podcasters in a way that’s fair to all parties.

In fact in some respects we’re moving backwards on this issue. A couple of years ago, Spotify did offer the ability for podcasters to embed full songs in episodes. But they’ve since discontinued that program.

Let’s do this. It’s well beyond the time to solve this problem. You aren’t screwing podcasters. You’re screwing artists who could be using podcasts to help promote their music. Hopefully Rick Beato’s rant finally reaches the right ears.

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