It’s been a tumultuous time at YouTube, with a number of important changes taking place regarding how the site handles content ID, and content management overall. Here Chris Robley of CD Baby breaks down some of the changes and explains how your bottom line might be affected by these shifts.
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By Chris Robley of CD Baby’s DIY Musician
Your audio content on YouTube, now monetized in more and fewer places. (Huh?)
It’s been a busy season of big changes at YouTube. If you’re curious what’s different about content claims and global monetization, read on.
Go even FURTHER with your music on YouTube…
YouTube Music and YouTube Premium are available now in 50 countries. That means making your music available for both YouTube Music and Content ID is more important than ever. It’s a worldwide music marketplace — so, ya know, be all global, okay?
Get full YouTube distribution and monetization
… but maybe expect a little less from Europe?
As you’re distributing and monetizing music worldwide on YouTube, it’s important to understand one region where you might expect less revenue from Content ID: Europe (and the 28 member nations of the EU).
New copyright reform laws were passed by the European Parliament that make it difficult for EU citizens to upload UGC (user-generated content) to social platforms if it contains copyrighted material such as your music!
A recent Tubefilter article explains:
The reform still has to be implemented individually in the 28 member nations of the EU, so it won’t go into effect just yet. Once the articles are implemented, however, platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter will face dramatic changes to how they handle copyrighted content. With Article 13, they will have to remove all copyrighted material uploaded by users in the EU, with no exceptions. (Right now, YouTube allows copyrighted content to remain uploaded on the platform at the discretion of copyright holders.)
Article 13 will also make these platforms legally liable for infringing content uploaded by third parties. (In the U.S., there are commonly-called “safe harbor” regulations that keep platforms from facing legal ramifications stemming from content uploaded by their users.)
It’s gonna be important to keep your eyes on this one, as it could mean less Content ID revenue from European territories. 
Tired of your videos getting “claimed?”
Now for some good news. For those of you who’re constantly getting manual claims placed on your videos, you might like to hear that YouTube will require the rights holder (or their administrator) to provide timestamps on exactly where their content appears in a particular video, so it’s not automatically treated as a claim on the whole video.
This change is intended to keep administrators from gettin’ all claim-happy (when Content ID is already out there doing the work) and to give creators a quicker process for resolving disputes.
So… now you know. And as G.I. Joe taught us in the 1980s, knowing is half the battle.
[Note: If this article were a YouTube video, the toy company HASBRO could timestamp a content claim for the previous sentence ONLY].