Facebook signs European licensing deal for music you share
Now you can legally put even more music in your Facebook and Insta videos.
Facebook has dealt with some criticism over the unpaid use of licensed music in videos on the company's various platforms like Instagram. Back in September of last year, it was reported that the social network was paying out "hundreds of millions of dollars" to labels to clear songs for this kind of use. The company also made deals with Sony and Universal to let you use the publishers' respective catalogs within uploaded videos. Now, according to a report at TechCrunch, Facebook signed a deal with licensing group ICE Services to allow around 31 million musical works from the UK, Sweden and Germany to grace the home movies you share on Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and Oculus.
The deal doesn't cover WhatsApp, as the licensing company thinks of it as a simple one-to-one app. "We understand that WhatsApp is currently used as a pure communication tool akin to private email / messaging," a spokesperson for ICE told TechCrunch. "This will be kept under review." According to ICE, this is the first multi-territorial license Facebook has signed with a licensing group like this, which works with rights holder groups like PRS (UK), STIM (Sweden) and GEMA (Germany). The deal will cover 160 territories and ensure that 290,000 rights holders get paid for their work, and will offer access to cleared music for video creators via a catalogue like the already-existing Sound Collection.
