With 225 million YouTube users in India and massive streams of Indian music on the platform, the ‘value gap’ battle is a growing battle in India.

What is the Value Gap? 

The value gap describes the growing mismatch between the value that user upload services' platforms such as YouTube, extract from music and the revenue that the music community who are creating and investing in music gains from it. The value gap is the biggest threat to the future sustainability of the music industry that is going highly digital. The ‘value gap’ in the music industry debate isn’t just a western concept. In India, there is a discussion going on and also, a fully-fledged political consultation exercise on how safe harbors should operate. The Indian government is considering new legislation – the  Information Technology [Intermediaries Guidelines (Amendment) Rules and Indian music-industry body IMI has published its response to this growing movement. According to a  Medianama report, the body’s approach will be familiar from that adopted by music-industry bodies elsewhere in the world.

“Any intermediary safe harbours should be limited to technical, automatic and passive intermediaries and on the condition that they operate in the manner expected of a diligent economic operator to prevent the availability of infringing content on their platforms,” suggested IMI, which believes YouTube and similar services “bear little resemblance to essential infrastructure providers”.

The Indian Music Industry (IMI) also wants such platforms to be forced to adopt a ‘notice and stay down’ policy rather than simply taking down individual pieces of content, they should ensure they are not re-uploaded by other users.