Date: June 10th, 2025

Dear Creators,

This is the follow-up we promised on May 21st about your delayed May payouts. After weeks of pressing YouTube for answers, we can now share our update.

In May, we identified massive gaps in the Shorts revenue data YouTube provided us. We contacted other established music companies to verify this wasn't isolated to Soundvio, where most of them were not aware of these issues before, but every single one later confirmed they've found identical problems.

When we initially found out about this, our parent company escalated this directly to YouTube's leadership with undeniable evidence: videos from our creators with properly tagged music, where YouTube had simply failed to report for revenue in our systems.

The outcome of these discussions was profoundly disappointing: YouTube admitted that its reporting system is broken and fails to capture significant amounts of music usage. However, they also shared that they have no current plans on fixing these reporting gaps and will not be compensating for the missing revenue.

Obviously, this news has been both shocking and disappointing. While we've pushed back, YouTube has indicated that this is how things are going to be.

Our concern extends beyond Soundvio: It suggests that YouTube may have under-reported music usage (and associated royalties) industry-wide for some time, affecting other music rights-holders as well, including other music rev-share libraries.

What does this mean for your payments?

Our #1 priority remains getting you paid for all the usage that YouTube has successfully reported.

Following this discovery about YouTube's under-reporting, we've identified that the data we received contains significant gaps and inaccuracies that must be corrected before we can process payments. We're now manually reviewing and correcting the revenue attribution for each video to ensure every creator receives exactly what they've earned.

While this verification process takes time, it's the only way to guarantee accuracy and that your money isn't paid to someone else. Our team is working as quickly as possible to complete this and get you paid.

The good news is that a majority of video usage was reported correctly, and this revenue will be paid out. However, we must be transparent: Because of YouTube's reporting issues, some music usage will be unaccounted for, simply because YouTube never attributed it to your videos, even in cases where the audio was manually tagged.

A Call for Industry-Wide Action

Given the scale of this issue, we strongly encourage our peers: labels, distributors, and other rights-owners, to conduct their own analysis of their YouTube Shorts data. It is highly likely you may be impacted by these same reporting failures without even knowing it, as the circumstances we discovered it are niche.

We built Soundvio to empower creators, and remain committed to being your partner and advocate. We thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this, and we are deeply sorry for having to deliver this frustrating news.

We will provide another update as we near completion of payments. If you have any questions, please reach out to support@soundvio.com.

Sincerely,

The Soundvio Team