YouTube will announce a long-awaited deal with global rights agency Merlin, which represents some 14,000 independent labels.Those announcements follow deals with indie labels such as the Beggars Group (whose roster includes Vampire Weekend), Merge Records (whose acts include Arcade Fire) and a settlement earlier this year with the National Music Publishers' Association on royalties for music publishers. In August, YouTube relaunched its music page, adding local concert listings, curated playlists and a kind of digital Billboard list: the YouTube Top 100.For the Google Inc.-owned YouTube, it's part of a long-term push to build its music section into a more robust consumer experience while also making more money for labels, big and small – and YouTube, too, of course."We see YouTube as a comprehensive entertainment destination and music is a core component of that," says Chris Maxcy, YouTube partner development director for music, games and platforms. "My charter is to make sure we have as comprehensive a catalog as possible of all the professionally produced video out there."Until recently, that catalog was mostly driven by major labels. Though the majors (Sony Music, EMI Group, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group) were skittish about YouTube in its early days and rights squabbles were common, they have all come to profit considerably from the video site.YouTube declined to give specific numbers, but said the music industry as a whole is making "hundreds of millions of dollars annually from having their content on YouTube" and that music ad revenue on YouTube for the major record labels has more than doubled year after year.