What is SESAC? YouTube blocks songs by Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Nirvana and other well-known artists

Due to a legal dispute in the US, YouTube has blocked songs by numerous well-known artists, including Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Bob Dylan and Nirvana. On Saturday, many, but not all, of these artists’ songs were unplayable on the video streaming platform. Attempts to play the blocked videos resulted in the message: “This video contains content from SESAC.” It is not available in your country.”

What is SESAC? YouTube pulls songs from popular artists due to legal dispute

SESAC, which stands for the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers, is a performance rights organization similar to BMI and ASCAP. The company, founded in 1930, was acquired by private equity firm Blackstone in 2017. According to its website, SESAC “currently licenses the public performance of more than 1.5 million songs on behalf of its over 15,000 affiliated songwriters, composers and music publishers.” As the second oldest performance rights organization in the United States, it has over 30,000 songwriters and more than 1 million compositions in their catalog.

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While SESAC has not yet resolved its dispute with YouTube, a representative for the music platform said in a statement to Variety: “We have been negotiating in good faith with SESAC to extend our existing contract.” Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we have not been able to do so to reach a fair agreement before the deadline expires. We take copyright very seriously and therefore the content represented by SESAC is no longer available on YouTube in the United States. We are in active discussions with SESAC and hope to reach a new agreement as soon as possible.”

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With popular songs suddenly no longer possible to stream, YouTube users expressed their frustration. In response to the outrage, the TeamYouTube account said: “For this reason, we have blocked content on YouTube in the US that is known to be associated with SESAC – in accordance with copyright law.”