Just to be clear it was only on my Crypto channel and I didn't get a copyright strike or anything. I knew I was using a part of a song that wasn't mine and I'm actually happy about the outcome overall.
So here is the e-mail I got.
So I filmed for over 10 days to get the footage for the last video on both my new Samsung S9 and my new GoPro 7 Black. Obviously hours and hours of footage gets edited down to less than 15 minutes but there were three audio clips that I used from other sources which I sited in the description. The first being the voice of Mike Posner before he performed live. He was just talking and strumming the guitar which I figured probably wouldn't be an issue but thought maybe it might hit the duplicate content filter.
Then the second one was a cover of Country Roads which has been sung by a lot of different artist overtime and for that section of the video it was super fitting. I wasn't sure if that would trigger anything or not since the guy signing it is mainly acting independently it seems. It brings up another question in some respects. Who did more work? The person who wrote the original song, the person who covered it, or me who is using a small piece of it in a larger video project? I would say that the person who wrote the song initially did more work than both the person who covered it and myself. Obviously I wanted to give him credit for sure. He did a really cool video to go along with it.
The third piece of audio that I used that triggered the demonetization of that video was Diplo - Revolution. It was so fitting for the time lapse I did of the city of Fort Lauderdale and crypto in general.
Here is the video I made that I'm talking about.
Conclusion
In the end any money made off that video will go to the labels behind that song Revolution. How their agreement with the artist is structured is anyone's guess I assume but in the end I'm OK with the outcome and actually think it is the right way to approach some of these disputes. Ads will still run on the video but the money will go to them.
The only better scenario would be that if an algorithm determined what percentage of a video any copyrighten material was used and then the money could be divided among the different artist and content creators. That is some complex shit but that would be cool. That way people would be incentivized to keep building on past work and success.
Truly original work is hard to 100% produce because even music itself is building from past work. Even the shots I gook under the waves was inspired by previous videos I saw where shots like that had been taken. The same with the time lapse of the city. I wouldn't have thought of doing that if I hadn't seen other timelapse sequences taken.