Canadian-Indian artist Tesher, who has 250,000 subscribers and over 49 million views on his YouTube channel, has successfully stopped the deletion of his account.
“Everything happened really fast,” Tesher said Monday, after having his YouTube channel running again.
“We were able to figure it out and save the channel which is amazing because this doesn’t usually happen.”
Last week, Tesher received fateful news that his videos on his YouTube account from several years back had been flagged by another record label.
YouTube’s copyright three-strike policy states, “A video can only have one copyright strike at a time.” YouTube may still have the option to suspend his account in the future. Attempts were made to speak to YouTube on their strike policy, but there was no response.
Tesher ended up with four strikes, placing him in the termination zone.
On Friday, Feb. 5, Tesher spoke out on his Instagram account.
View this post on Instagram
“I have some unfortunate news,” said Tesher. “My YouTube channel and all my videos on it are going to be taken down in the next couple of days.
“This was bound to happen sooner or later.”
Tesher is no stranger to having his videos deleted – the artist dealt with similar situations in the past with YouTube and SoundCloud.
“I tried to reach out to the record label [who flagged his YouTube account] to see if we can resolve things,” said Tesher.
“I don’t know why exactly they decided to wait until 2021, where I have the most attention on me to start getting aggressive about videos from 2016-2017.”
Artists and producers often risk copyright infringement, which explains why labels are always on the lookout.
However, Tesher advocates he and others are not trying to steal songs or make money. They simply are producing because they love the music and are inspired to share their own version.
“They [labels] gain so much more by letting people share their spin on it,” said Tesher. “It is free Content ID money for the label. It’s free promotion for the song. It extends the life span of the song and spreads it to different audiences, different countries and so on.
“For some reason we don’t like to equate remixes or covers as acceptable creative expression, like dance videos.”
In his Instagram video, Tesher explained the situation and his thoughts, asking fans and viewers to reach out if they had connections to help stop the deletion of his YouTube account.
Luckily for Tesher, there was a breakthrough.
Under the impression his YouTube channel would be taken down on Feb. 8 at midnight California time, Tesher took to Instagram LIVE to do a countdown and tell people the story behind some of his videos he created.
“It hit 2 a.m. Regina time [midnight California time] and the channel was still up,” said Tesher. “I thought maybe it would go down later because the copyright strikes were still on the account.”
Tesher went to sleep and woke up around 5 a.m., and the channel was down.
“I could not access anything,” said Tesher. “Then later in the day one of my connections said I was back up and running.”
The people who reached out to Tesher each had their own connection and were able to pull the right strings in time.
For now, Tesher’s YouTube channel is still running.
“I am not going to lie, as sick and twisted as it is, this is the kind of stuff that motivates me,” said Tesher. “To everyone supporting me, I love you. To everyone not supporting me, I love you even more.”
