Should YouTube pay PRS _any_ money for music videos?

Yes, absolutely.

The question is ridiculous. When it comes to a song that is registered with PRS, if YouTube want to stream it they have no choice.

Ask any of your friends who takes time to write songs and is struggling to build an income stream from their hard work. Besides the Elton Johns of this world, it is they who make up the bulk of PRS membership.

Of course PRS are going to ask for the maximum they can get - they represent the interests of their members. Your friend down the road who writes songs doesn't have the clout to take this up with a huge company like YouTube / Google.

Obviously PRS don't always get it 100% right, neither can they represent precisely the nuanced opinions of their thousands of members. There are very few other options for royalty collection.

A more appropriate question would be to the little musicians: do PRS represent your views adequately and why?

Yes / no / don't know here is about as insightful as a tabloid phone-in. Hence my comment. Good day sir!

I'm uncertain.

The song is the artist's work (though there's undeniably artistry in the video production as well). If the artist gains money for this reproduction of his/her song, then it's fair to pass that cost along to the broadcaster, in this case YouTube.

But on the flipside, the amount charged to the purchaser for the song doesn't seem to correlate well with the production and publicity costs. Some really expensive lavish videos cost a bomb, where the songs cost the same... similarly some videos happen to cost less but the songs still don't.

One of the functions of music videos is as publicity for the song. If this is the case, shouldn't it be paid for out of the earnings of the song (or perhaps the artist's previous releases) ? Perhaps getting the video out there and played widely improves sales of the song enough to cover its costs. Hard to measure.

The record labels take a LARGE cut of the money, but I'm not in a position to say whether they deserve it (for being the central nexus of song-making expertise, publicity and resources, and a catalyst to the creative process) or not (for taking too much profit and not passing enough to the actual creators, thus living off them like parasites).

Do any actual recording artists have a balanced opinion on this? I mean sure, you want as much money as you can get, but there is significant evidence that this "evil" piracy actually improves things! What do you think?

I disagree Carl - why pay? The artist is getting free publicity. If any recording artist thinks the future is getting paid for content, then they've simply not been paying attention. Those days are over my friend. What you have to assume is content is free - digital content is impossible to contain. So you need to make money from other revenue streams - gigging be the obvious one. This is actually what used to happen - musicians used to get money from gigging and then records became a way of promoting that. Then we had a period where the record itself was the main revenue stream. Now it will go back to how it was. It may mean that the chances of having a one hit and then retiring are gone, but maybe that's the way it goes.
So in this respect the key question is not how much they should be paid, but whether they should at all, since it's just ignoring the inevitable. If YouTube pay them, there are plenty of sites who won't.

Martin - but the question isn't 'what would be ideal?', it's about the situation now. And until the PRS get to understand the Internet and develop better models, the answer is as Carl says; YouT have to pay.

Just to expand on Michael's point, yes there is money to be made here. (Just to clarify, PRS represent songwriters and publishers - not recording artists. Although, obviously those categories overlap.) I would agree that the situation has changed to one where content owners are now competing with free sources (such as torrents). Yes, big parts of the music industry are belatedly trying to diversify whether that be gigs, merchandise, endorsements/partnerships with "brands" (e.g. Groove Armada's record deal with Bacardi - I happen to think both are pretty awful but it works for some). And of course sync (licensing songs and recordings to film/TV). But even in the pure "content" business, price is NOT the sole factor in user choice. Spotify is a good illustration of this. They are a licensed music service which has deals with indie AND major labels as well as PRS and the other UK collection societies MCPS/PPL. Many people had written off any kind of ad-supported model (because US services like Spiralfrog were underperforming). Spotify's USPs are its ease of use (ridiculously easy - even easier than torrents) and the collaborative playlist features. Try it... I'd also say that being legal gives it an edge among some users. (Maybe they're the same people who paid for Radiohead's album even though they didn't have to). So there are other ways to compete with free and in theory make money. If you can implement one, you can legally make money from content too! Besides, Steve Jobs got a few more people into iTunes shop by claiming that if you use peer-to-peer, you're working for less than minimum wage (to say nothing of the system lock-in he got from DRM... that's another story). The intent original question is unclear - I don't know if you wanted a philosophical discussion about copyright instead?