How to deal with copyrights on youtube?

It seems like playing it a half step up or down doesn’t result in copyright issues. Also some bands don’t and some bands do take it down(for example A7x, rhcp and John Mayer did not take mine down and Led zeppelin did). In the end I’m not sure how to deal with it I just know that vimeo seems to care less anout copyright

I uploaded a lot of videos on my channel and all I ever got was that either they demonetized my video because it had some music that wasn’t mine or the video got a copyright claim cause I used a famous song. Then I got an e-mail where it said that there’s nothing to worry about, just that the owner of the song will either get the revenue from ads on that video or that he will get my stats about that video. The video did not get removed, it’s still there. But with new youtube partner program you need 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time to be able to have ads on the video. Since I don’t, I don’t have and ads on my videos. I assume you don’t either so I have no idea why it got removed. What song did you use, did you use a backing track or what?

If it’s a newer song then I would understrand why it got removed cause usually when the song is released they tend to remove the videos if they don’t want it on youtube

I guess so, I did some research and people were complaining that hopeless records are removing covers. https://www.reddit.com/r/Sum41/comments/4zrp0e/hopeless_records_taking_down_covers/
But still, there are couple of covers of that song on youtube and I don’t understand why they are not removed. All the videos were uploaded like 6-7 years ago and the newest one was 9 months ago.

When you use someone else’s music in your video, they basically have full rights to decide what happens, since it’s their original content and not yours. YouTube has an algorithm that automatically finds this music without any human input, so sometimes it’s erroneous (my friend has a gaming channel and he’s always baffled that it found a rap song copyright in the star fox credits). But basically, when they find a song in your video, they can either
A) Leave it be and put ads on your video, all the revenue of which will go to them and not you or,
B) They can put in a formal copyright claim and have your video removed.
If A happens, it’s called a claim, and you’re fine. The worst that will happen is a small ad might appear at the beginning of the video. If B happens, it’s called a copyright strike, and if you accumulate 3 of those within 180 days (I believe, it may be 90), then your channel will be banned and you can’t create a new one. A claim is NOT a strike. You can have infinite claims on your channel with no negative effect. But if you get a Strike, you wanna watch out. If you get a copyright notice and you think it’s erroneous, you can dispute it with youtube or the creator.
Hope this helps!

Youtube tend to be a lot more strict if you have the original track in the video, i know it would be a bit annoying to post it without the track to play over but it may cause less issue with copyright