It seems that YouTube’s traffic numbers for music videos might not be quite as accurate as many had hoped, with Warner Music Group pointing to some fairly questionable numbers.

YouTube does have its own music service...

Word comes via Cnet that Warner Music saw a massive spike in the number of unique visitors to its various different YouTube videos between over the course of December and January, with reports indicating that it had managed to more than double its traffic, seeing views around the 47 million mark in a month. Still, all might not be as well as it seems from that description…

Apparently, it seems that the massive boost in the number of viewers for the last month or so isn’t due to some massive upsurge in popularity of viewing music videos online, but rather the result of a change in the way YouTube reports those numbers. Apparently, there’s been a bit of a conflation, that sees YouTube reporting content put together by its users that features music from publishers as views of that music to publishers… which is fairly interesting.

The official word from YouTube is that,

“The latest ComScore report reflects a combination of evolving methodologies and different partners having deals around different kinds of content, including user-generated content and publishing.”

It’s certainly an interesting shift, and one that we imagine Warner will be very curious to get to the bottom of, considering the change essentially obscures the popularity of Warner’s own dedicated music channels on YouTube somewhat.

Still, it’s unlikely that the folks at Warner will throw the baby out with the bathwater over the unusual numbers, given the fact that YouTube is still sending the publisher a fairly pronounced amount of traffic and, presumably, money. It’ll be interesting to see just how well YouTube’s music service works out for publishers.