The system YouTube has built for copyright holders is highly privileged, and you should not be surprised that anyone who can manage to take advantage of it does

The system YouTube has built for copyright holders is highly privileged, and you should not be surprised that anyone who can manage to take advantage of it does. For example, the cost to generate some kind of copyrighted music and submit it to ContentID is cheap enough that content creators can monetize their own videos by deliberately including music designed to trip ContentID and pay the copyright owner (that is, themselves) advertising revenue. The advantage to this is that when there are multiple competing copyright claims on a video, one common solution is that advertising revenue is split between claimants. So if you monetize via a copyright claim, you get 1/Nth of the advertising money, rather than the flat zero that the uploader gets when subjected to copyright claims.