Help & Understanding YouTube Claims

ZENmix doesn’t make any claims on YouTube, but their system is broken and causing false positives, like mistaking oceans sounds as duplicates. And sometimes it can be a fraudulent case (e.g. Records DK via DistroKid) where the claimer doesn’t own the rights and isn’t even eligble.

Now the long answer about YT claims:

Copyright claims on YouTube are a pain and can affect any channel owner regardless of where they buy licensed music from. Unfortunately, it’s because the YouTube system is broken and buggy as hell. Resulting in my false positive claims. And sometimes fraudulent people too.

Let me explain that in depth.

First, ZENmix doesn’t make claims on YouTube. For making claims on YouTube, one needs to have a YouTube Content ID for their songs but sadly meditation music or nature sounds aren’t eligible for that at all.

However, it still happens that old or wrongly acquired YouTube Content IDs still have nature sounds or bells, gongs, etc. in them and that messes up the YouTube algorithms and it will file wrong claims.

Based on that ID and the associated song, their algorithm tries to find similar sounding audio and automatically generates those claims. But that detection is buggy as hell and can get confused by i.e. ocean waves, drums and believes it’s the same song and makes the claim.

What I do on my own channel is to listen to those claims, find a possible reason, like similar nature sounds, and file a dispute directly in YouTube studio stating that I own a license of the sound and that only e.g. the ocean waves, are similar. I won all disputes.

I advise all customers to do the same and as far as I know, it’s working for them too.

And case it’s a fraudulent claim, contact me and I can give you a special reply for your dispute.

It affects all small and independent music producers and channel owners but sadly nobody can fix it as we have no control over YouTube.

Bests Jens