Justin Bieber’s YouTube Coachella set had nothing to do with who owns his music

This past Saturday at the Coachella music festival, Justin Bieber played the first of two headlining sets in a deal reportedly worth $10 million. It was his most significant solo performance in years. But Bieber spent some of his time on stage the way many of us do on Saturday nights: on YouTube. For some of the set, Bieber played parts of his older songs right off YouTube from a Mac laptop. Behind him, on the stage’s screen, you could see YouTube’s website as he searched for songs in real time and then put the videos on full-screen while he sang along on stage.

“I’m sorry to cut it, but these are little snippets. I just want to see how far back you go,” he tells the crowd at one point. This part of the setlist included early songs like “Baby,” “Favorite Girl,” “That Should Be Me,” “Beauty and a Beat,” and “Never Say Never.” Bieber, who was discovered thanks to YouTube, even showed two covers of him as a young kid singing the songs.

For longtime Bieber fans, the clips were probably a fun trip down memory lane. But according to the Daily Mail, “the real reason Justin couldn’t play his old music in full has now been revealed, as he sold his entire music catalogue back in December 2022,” speculating that the sale “could be why he heavily focused on his new music.” (Bieber’s catalog sale to Hipgnosis Song Management, which has since rebranded to Recognition Music Group, was announced in 2023).

However, based on what experts tell The Verge, that isn’t the case.

“The Daily Mail is wrong about that,” Daniel J. Schacht, an IP, music, and entertainment attorney, tells The Verge. “The sale of his music catalog did not prevent Bieber from performing his songs.”

“That’s not how this works,” says James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. “That’s not how any of it works.”

When Bieber sold his back catalog, Recognition took over publishing copyrights and master recordings, according to The Hollywood Reporter. But Grimmelmann explains that the “relevant copyright here is the public performance right in the songs.” Those rights are administered by performance rights organizations (PRO), and venues like Coachella will enter into agreements to license an entire repertory from the organizations so that “performers can then perform any song from the catalog.” While Recognition Music Group may now hold the right to get royalties from those licenses, Bieber “never needed to own those rights to be able to perform them in any situation covered by PRO licenses.”

In theory, perhaps, Bieber and Recognition could have specifically negotiated that he can’t perform his old songs. Schacht, however, notes that “a catalog sale that restricts an artist’s right to perform music would be unprecedented, and the word is that there is no such restriction in Bieber’s deal.” He also points out a more practical consideration: “why would the new owner want to stop attention being paid to the original videos and recordings? This seems like a net positive for them, including increased streams of the original works.”

A source familiar with the catalog sale also told Billboard that the claim was “nonsense,” saying that “There are no restrictions on what he can or can’t do in live performance.”

It wasn’t just songs that Bieber played off YouTube, by the way: he and everyone at Coachella also watched a clip of a young Bieber walking into a glass door, one where he falls off a stage, a recently-infamous clip where he scolds a paparazzi for not “clocking” that he’s “standing on business”, the Deez Nuts video, and the double rainbow video.

“Alright, I’m getting pulled into the deep dark web,” he said partway through the double rainbow video, getting up from his seat. “We gotta keep this show going, man. Let’s do this.”