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Last night Majestic Casual had its hugely popular Youtube channel deleted from Youtube for multiple third party copyright claims.

The popular channel – which deals in summery pictures and deep house tracks – had amassed 2.3 million Youtube subscribers and was one of the first music-based channels to blow-up on Youtube in recent years.

We can’t say we are surprised though.

Almost all Youtube music channels work in a grey area of copyright, where PRs, artists, and to an extent labels give them permission to post music to their channel to help boost the profile of artists looking to get their tracks heard.

What appears to happen is once an artist blows up, the labels, quite rightly, then want to regain control of their music, and the ability monetise said music – so they use copyright claims on the very same channels which helped them break their artists.

For instance, if an artist is part of a royalty collection society, like PRS, any agreement they make with a channel for exposure is legally superseded by the agreement they make with a collection society to control their works online.

Basically, if a PR or label gives you permission to post their music don’t be surprised if they make copyright claim against you later down the line.

This sort of practice has been rampant on Soundcloud, and to a lesser extent on Youtube. Whether Majestic Casual will be able to reinstate their channel remains unknown, at the moment the channel has simply commented “… sorry for this” on the channel’s Facebook page.

But considering they don’t own any of the music on the channel it would seem it’s unlikely it will be reinstated.

It’s not an ideal situation but it just the way copyright law works. If you’re going to post music on your Soundcloud or Youtube that you don’t own – don’t be surprised if eventually you feel the full force of the ban hammer.

Majestic Casual had begun making steps to move away from Youtube with their own fully licensed compilation and maybe that’s where their future lies, they’ve created the brand and following, so it’s conceivable they’ll be back in some form or another – but it’s unlikely to be as a Youtube channel.

via Stoney Roads

Andrew Rafter

Andrew Rafter is the editor and founder of Harder Blogger Faster.