Come on YouTube, this is no fun….

Ok it’s no secret we all love YouTube.
In fact we recently cancelled our TV for the simple reason we never watched it because 99% of what we watch is YouTube and Netflix but as a creator I have to be honest, sometimes YouTube is sometimes just….. well let’s keep it civil.

Over the years I’ve put over 1000 videos on YouTube, ranging from interviews, live streams, educational, vlog, Behind the Scenes and a lot more so we have quite a catalog online. If you didn’t already make sure to subscribe to www.youtube.com/frankdoorhof and hit the bell it really helps us out.

It’s no secret that in reality you don’t earn a lot from YouTube, unless you have millions of subs and/or get sponsored. So we mostly just put videos on there because I just love the interaction with you guys.

Now a little bit of side information.
For most videos we use music, because let’s be honest a behind the scenes video without music, is a bit boring. Now a days we use Epidemic, which is a huge online library of free to use music, and the quality is very good and they have something for everyone, I highly recommend them, but keep reading for a good deal.

In the past however we used something called Quicktracks, or Sonic fire, depending on when you bought it. This is a software app that creates music dynamically from samples, it’s literally awesome, you set the mood, variation and time and it spits out the music, in fact we invested in an app that was working under Premiere that literally made it possible to on the fly create music fitting any time span we needed, awesome awesome stuff, not cheap… but worth it.

Well….. it’s been gathering dust. YouTube started mailing “claims” a few years ago, companies trying to “steal” the income from creators that worked their asses of to get you guys free material are now missing revenue from millions of videos on the platform. Now it’s only a few cents here, and a few cents here so a lot of people, including me in the past didn’t really object, but at one point I had over half of my videos claimed, and that all added up to 50-100.00 a month missed revenue, now that’s not a lot of money, but…. it is a lot of money when you add everything up, now also realize that I’m just a very small creator compared to guys with millions of subs.

So we started to object and dispute the claims, thinking it would be a lot of work and we would never win…. much to our surprise often within an hour you will get a response from YouTube that the other party had 48 hours to reply but they didn’t so the claim was lifted…. now if that is not weird? Unless it’s some kind of Star Trek time mess-up.

Anyway, ever since we are filing disputes, stopped using quicktracks and went for Epidemic, and much to our relieve all claims stopped on the new videos. On the older ones however we still get weekly, sometimes daily claims. But todays claim just triggered my “funny bone”.

Really YouTube.
3 companies claimed my music?
In the same clip? and in fact it’s the same music, just a different variation…. now if it wasn’t so annoying it would actually be funny.

Am I angry, no not really?
But please guys realize that people on YouTube literally work their asses off to get you guys free videos to enjoy.
YouTube revenue is almost nothing, so most creators are running Patreon websites (www.patreon.com/frankdoorhof starting at $1.00 a month) or other forms of sponsoring. Having companies with huge amounts of money claiming the channels of creators is in my book absolutely ridiculous and should be stopped.

Now let’s make one thing clear.
I don’t want to use songs from an artist without permission. That goes without saying, you can’t just use a song from an album under your video for free, the artists created it and should be compensated.

However it doesn’t stop there.
As a guitar enthusiast I follow some YouTube channels about home recording, guitar lessons, best riffs etc. And what’s going on there is even worse. If you follow certain channels you’ll see that there is a lot of complaints about YouTube claiming riffs that are played by the creator him/herself as an example, solos that are played for education, and a Dutch guitar educator (Paul Davids) even had his own music claimed because someone else used it….. Or spectre studio who got a claim because he used some samples in a video on autotune and that fans deserve better.

Again if you just use music from a band under your video, guys that’s wrong.
But using riffs, solos etc. for lessons…. that’s the whole idea of YouTube, you can’t claim a I,IV,V chord progression… well it happens.

Now with our channel the claims are solved pretty fast, although I did lost some disputes totally unfairly but I just gave up because otherwise my channel would get a strike (yeah talk about being with your back against the wall). But it can be much worse.

Recently I listened to a podcast about a musician that created a whole YouTube channel with backing tracks, and I love those. For people not knowing what it is, a backing track in essence is a track where you as a guitarist (bassist/vocalist etc) can play over. Now some backing tracks are from well known songs and they for example removed the guitar parts, now with those I can imagine that they get a claim, it’s a full song and money is earned so yeah… pretty clear. However in this case it was about a musician that created ALL tracks himself, drums, bass, keys, rhythm guitar etc. He even has the masters to prove it.

So what happened?
Well these backing tracks are used by other musicians to play over, I’ve done it countless times myself (it’s an awesome learning tool), but I never uploaded them but countless other people do, and somehow in a weird algorithm YouTube was claiming the creators channel, and I mean a total claim. Meaning the guy couldn’t earn a cent from whatever he uploaded, he tried to contact YouTube several times and getting an automated reply, at one point he just gave up and was thinking about starting a new channel and just try what went wrong.

And that’s the main problem.
In the past I’ve had HUGE problems with my videos being demonetized the moment I uploaded them, like 99% of what we uploaded got marked right away. This means that the videos were not visible in certain countries and were labeled inappropriate for the general public. In the end we “I think” found out what the problem was, in our keywords I used the term “modelshoot” as soon as I took that away…. voila no more problems, same with “Photoshoot” in all honesty I’m a bit stunned because it makes it even harder now to label my videos, because in essence I think a lot of people will search on modelshoot or photoshoot, but I also don’t want my channel to be cut off completely. We tested this a few times and every time we used those words the same thing happened, maybe it’s the term “shoot” we don’t know, and YouTube doesn’t answer the questions we asked, you just get a response back in the form of “your video is labeled inappropriate for certain audiences”, yeah but WHY???? tell me WHY???  😀 as so many things, we just gave up and removed those keywords.

Anyway long story short…..
Sometimes it sucks being a creator…. so join our YouTube channel and make it a bit more fun.

Ok and I promised something cool for you guys.
So here we go. If you create videos and want some really cool music but don’t want to spend a lot of money for services like Epidemic, there is a shortcut. I’ve been using talentsy for a while now and for $7.99 you get a lot of extra goodies, but in all honesty I just use it for epidemic, so if you’re also active with YouTube, or other video stuff check them out, use our link to also support our work… This is the link