The battle between YouTube owner Google and the music industry now has multiple theaters, on both sides of the Atlantic.  In the United States, Warner Music Group has yanked its content, based on dissatisfaction with per-video payouts.  In the United Kingdom, YouTube is proactively pulling music videos following a cantankerous negotiation process with performance rights group PRS for Music.

Artists like Billy Bragg argue that cash-rich Google should pay more for video content, but Google argues that YouTube – as a standalone business – should pay just a portion of per-video revenues.  And when it comes to advertising revenue, YouTube is notorious for drawing low CPMs.  Should Google divert revenues from other, more successful business lines, in an act of philanthropy for music content owners?

Big arguments, and big guns on both sides.  But lots of smaller guys are unhappy with the contentious climate, and quietly suffering while their overlords wage war.  YouTube is an incredibly potent promotional tool, and getting yanked means missing out on a highly-viral channel because of a corporate diktat from above.

Take Roadrunner Records, a metal label majority-owned by Warner Music Group.  Roadrunner is home to a range of harder-edged acts, including Lamb of God, Killswitch Engage, and Mastadon.  Just recently, internet entrepreneur Philip Kaplan (best known for starting f-dcompany.com) offered a comedic air-drumming video to Suffocation, whose “Infecting the Crypts” can be found on a Roadrunner release.  That video was unfortunately yanked because of the broader Warner fallout, despite 3.5 million views and a nice awareness punch for the extreme metal band.

But the story is much bigger than that.  Turns out that Roadrunner has been carefully growing one of the top YouTube channels, not just within music but across all categories.  “It was a bit of a professional blow to me when videos began coming down,” Roadrunner director of New Media Jeremy Rosen told Digital Music News.  “I spent the better part of two years carefully building the Roadrunner Records YouTube channel into one of the top ten music channels by subscribers and views on the site; one of the top channels period.”

Now, Rosen is forced to redirect users to roadrunnerrecords.com, and deal with the compromised conversion percentage.  Still, the executive remains “on the fence” on the broader issue, simply because the amount of revenues generated by YouTube were unclear.

But the promotional benefits appeared to trump those concerns.  Rosen attempted to gain some sort of exemption for the Roadrunner channel, without success.  “Thankfully we’ve put a lot of work into our own properties as well, so having a record label site unlike any other I’ve seen to date ameliorates the sting,” Rosen stated.  “Still, all my hours at YouTube have, for the time being, come to naught.”

The next steps are difficult, especially since the duration of the standoff remains unclear.  And, the longer the disagreement, the longer the audience attrition.  According to one executive with expertise in online videos, the Roadrunner subscriber base of more than 133,000 offers serious opportunity, and Rosen should continue to populate the channel with non-music content like artist interviews, comedic bits, or other filler.  Perhaps that is making lemonade out of lemons, but without the music, fans are likely to be disappointed.

Report by publisher Paul Resnikoff.