Sources: Facebook has made deals with Sony, UMG, and Warner Music for the right to show music videos and approached artists about exclusive rights to videos
- Social giant also could bankroll some video production — Music videos have surged on YouTube during the pandemic
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a five-year loop: Facebook's 2015 push to license music videos for the feed stalled, but the company kept building the legal groundwork — a multi-territory Sony/ATV publishing deal in 2018 and, per the related coverage, offers of hundreds of millions of dollars to cover infringing music in user uploads. By December 2019 it was testing music videos in Thailand and India explicitly to revive Watch.
The new step is qualitatively different: deals with all three major labels — Sony, UMG, and Warner — plus reported approaches to artists for exclusive rights and possible Facebook-funded production. With music videos surging on YouTube during the pandemic, Facebook is attacking the category at its moment of peak engagement.
First-order effects
- YouTube's near-monopoly on official music videos now faces a funded challenger with the full major-label catalog licensed, and labels gain a second serious buyer for video rights at the top of the market.
Second-order effects
- If Facebook's exclusive-rights approaches to artists gain traction, availability fragments across platforms, forcing YouTube to defend key videos with its own exclusives or improved revenue splits — and raising the price of every future licensing round for both sides.
Third-order effects
- Labels structurally diversify music video distribution beyond a single platform, converting video from a YouTube-anchored asset into a competitively licensed one — with Facebook potentially becoming a financier of video production, not just a distributor.
The trend: Music video distribution is shifting from a YouTube-centric market to a competitively licensed, multi-platform one, with the major labels' bargaining power rising as Facebook buys in.