Saving Country Music is cheering on Beato. Rick Beato is Right to Rant About Music Copyright Strikes
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.
The problem is really YouTube, and maybe other video platforms. If UMG says you have violated copyright, then you have as far as YouTube is concerned. Fair Use? What's that?
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?”
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Hat tip to Pixy Misa and Daily News Stuff 31 August 2025: Feets Still Hurts Edition
Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes. (Saving Country Music)
Beato is a musician and record producer who has worked in the industry for more than 40 years, and has a YouTube channel full of great short documentaries, where he either knows the participants or was there personally.
Universal Music Group has declared war on him.
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I have learned more about music, how it's made, what makes it good, etc, from Rick Beato's channel in the last year than I learned in a decade in 'industry adjacent' positions including touring with musicians...
ReplyDeleteHe is a cheerleader for music, musicians, and the music industry. I've recommended his channel to dozens of people. The industry should be writing the guy blank checks not stifling him.
nick
UMG seems to be the worst offender. They are dinosaurs living in the 1990s, who have no idea of the impact of social media and YT. And he is not ripping them off.
DeleteAnd Boomers wonder why no one listens to music from the '70s or '80s anymore.