Having got into funk and R&B, he moved to San Francisco for what was to be a year out from studying. This, Bagale says, made him a “jazz snob” and he went to study at Eastman School Of Music in Rochester. “I was about 12 years old and it’s the first time I got paid doing anything!” he says.Īt high school, he focused on the drums and was taught by Rich Thompson who used to play in the Count Basie Orchestra.

In 7th grade, one of his bands played his school’s dances performing covers of songs by Weezer, Nirvana, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles. The inevitable high-school bands were formed to play covers, but Bagale was also learning to write and record. “They were the number one influence for me.” “When I was 11 I saw The Beatles Anthology documentary and said, ‘I want to do that!’” he tells Music Ally. He and his brothers would grow up surrounded by music and be nurtured as multi-instrumentalists. This is his story.īorn in 1983, Bagale grew up in Rochester, New York as the youngest of three boys, with a father who taught music theory, composition and recording at high schools and had built a home studio. His songs have been used in more than 3.5m YouTube videos that cumulatively have more than 7.6bn views. Performer and producer Otis McDonald (real name: Joe Bagale) has given away most of his music through YouTube’s royalty-free audio library, which it makes available for creators to soundtrack their videos. It’s never been a contradiction that amid this often-bitter debate, a variety of artists have found ways to use YouTube as a platform for audience-building AND growing incomes. It’s not that YouTube isn’t licensed or paying royalties – it is – but rather that (in rightsholders’ eyes) going into negotiations without the existing safe harbours would put YouTube on a level playing field with other services like Spotify, and (they hope) lead to higher payments.

With the EU Copyright Directive passed but still to be implemented by the different member states, the issue of the ‘value gap’ certainly hasn’t gone away.Īt the heart of this debate is the argument that ‘user-uploaded content’ services, most notably YouTube, that use music as such a core part of their business should be paying more to music rightsholders. Tags: Artists Otis McDonald safe harbour YouTube

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