Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
YouTube is working on a new program to let creators monetize their longform videos that use licensed music.
At its Made on YouTube event today, the company announced Creator Music, opening up a catalog of popular music for content creators to use in their videos without getting their monetization dinged. Creators have a few options: they can either license tracks directly and keep all of the revenue (besides the 45 percent cut YouTube takes) or share revenue with the license holders. According to Billboard, that share is 27.5 percent each to the video creator and artists.
Using music has been a challenge for YouTube creators, who have generally had to use royalty-free music in order to keep their videos from being demonetized. Using even…