The National Music Publishers Association ^[1], which represents songwriters and music publishers, has reached a settlement with YouTube after four years of litigation. Songwriters and music publishers will begin to receive royalties when their work appears on YouTube as a result of the settlement.

YouTube’s Content ID software will be used to identify the owner of a composition so that royalties and a share of ad revenues can be distributed regardless of whether or not the artist uploads a song.

“We’ve long had agreements with all four major record labels as well as dozens of independent labels, and now that we are broadening our coverage with more publishers, we’ll be able to create more revenue streams for all of them,” YouTube wrote on a company blog ^[2].

Read more at ReadWriteWeb ^[3].