Last week, we reported that Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ had been turned into a Fortnite emote – one of the dances that players can perform in-game to celebrate or goad opponents. This emote included a clip of the actual track.

We (and more importantly, the game’s publisher Epic Games) should have spotted the obvious problem coming: people recording videos of Fortnite gameplay to upload to YouTube quickly realised that if the ‘Never Gonna’ emote was used, the Content ID tool would identify it – and (potentially, depending on the rightsholder’s settings) lose the ad revenue for that entire video. Now Epic Games has moved to fix the issue, initially for PC.

“We’ve added the ability to mute Licensed Emote Audio. This option is available in the game’s Audio settings,” tweeted the company. “We also intend to bring this Audio setting to other platforms in future updates.” That’s good news for YouTubers, but there’s also some good news for the music industry here: if ‘licensed emote audio’ is worth launching a fix for, that suggests there’ll be more of these emotes coming in the months ahead – and thus revenues for their rightsholders.

Stuart Dredge