“We simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide.” (via Brand Republic)

Ignore, for the moment, the fact that by pulling all their videos, they’ve almost invited Google to pull all their search results (Sometimes it’s a real shame the company claims to ‘do no evil’)

Ironically just four hours later Universal Music was featured on Cnet as making ‘tens of millions of dollars from Youtube’, according to Executive VP, Rio Caraeff:

“(YouTube) is not like radio, where it’s just promotional,” said Caraeff, who heads up Universal’s digital group. “It’s a revenue stream, a commercial business. It’s growing tremendously. It’s up almost 80 percent for us year-over-year in the U.S. in terms of our revenue from this category.”

“Certainly, in the last year the rise of free to consumer ad-supported video has become a very significant part of our business coming from a variety of areas,” Caraeff said. “YouTube is driving a very large quantity of that… We have a great relationship with YouTube, and the future for us will be more than with YouTube than we’re doing today.

“We’re working with them on a variety of new concepts and new businesses to take the groundwork we’ve done in the last year and half and do a lot more with it,” he added. “I wouldn’t expect to see us just do business with YouTube like we used to do.”

The estimate from a ‘music industry source’ is almost $100 million from music streaming across the web.

And then Stan Schroeder eloquently sums up on Mashable why a rumoured Hulu-type video portal for Sony BMG, EMI, Universal Musica Group and Warner would be a monumental wast of time and effort.

The drum beat you hear is that of consumers who want to be able to enjoy, spread, love, talk about, share, promote, remember, and most of all, buy into the event and joy of music, hitting their heads repeatedly on their keyboards, laptops, MP3 players and Smartphones.