Warner Music returns to YouTube
Warner Music is returning to YouTube after a nine-month blockade over licensing. The music label has agreed to return its full catalog to YouTube in return for more control and a larger cut of advertising. The new accord gives Warner the right to sell its own ads on "enhanced" channels devoted to WMG artists as well as against …
Leave it to the music industry to come up with a way to not only not have to pay for their songs to be advertised (including links to iTunes and Amazon in videos using the songs), but make the advertising company pay THEM for it.
I am not one to defend big corporations or the like, but YouTube is doing these record companies a big favor. Why in hell do they keep fighting it is beyond me. YouTube is advertising their music for free.
Anecdote time.
A few weeks ago a friend created a FaceBook event, of which I was one of the invited people, to go see a band called Gogol Bordello. They're coming to town next month. Never having heard of the guys, and being a bit busy with many things at the time, I clicked on "no". Fast forward a couple of weeks, and another friend (musician) who's a fan of that band posts a YouTube link to one of their videos. Being more unoccupied at that moment, I decided to click on the thing to see what all the enthusiasm was about. The damn gypsy punks are awesome and I was blown away by that and several other of their crazy videos on YouTube. A few more days and I had bought a couple of their MP3 albums on Amazon. And now I HAVE to go see that concert.
None of that would have happened if Gogol Bordello's videos weren't freely available somewhere for a friend to post them (watching TV is not my forte, and "music video" channels do not really exist anymore anyway). I don't listen to radio often either, and this band is not the type of thing you hear in the typical 'Merkin airwaves very often, unfortunately. Now I've spent a bunch of money on their albums and concert, and have new music I enjoy. Who's lost anything here, I wonder?
I'd tell them to fuck off.
So they want Google to pay a licence fee and they want to advertise their own ads on there.
I know. I'll never understand how the music biz created a business model where radio stations and sites like YouTube pay to advertise someone else's product.
