Youtube removes copyrighted audio from videos – killing music promotion
Not only is the Music Industry intent on destroying itself, but it seems intent on taking Youtube with it.
In an utterly bizarre fashion, Youtube appears to be using it’s audio fingerprinting software to remove any audio which infringes copyright, but is leaving the original videos online.
Previously, copyright-infringers were either notified, or had their videos removed entirely. There’s no word on whether this new approach was instituted by Google/Youtube, or whether, as most people presume, it was forced by increased pressure from the music industry.
But as the huge amount of online coverage has pointed out, it’s going to hurt everyone involved:
The music industry was unlikely to be losing sales from the majority of fan videos and could have instituted a decent licencing solution.
Youtube won’t be the place for some of the fantasically popular fan videos built around any copyrighted content – for instance the second most viewed Youtube video of all time.
And users will lose out as millions of videos, and all the work that went into them, suddenly become destroyed.
Just some of the negative coverage:
So it’s already on most of the biggest and most-read blogs, and is spreading like wildfire.
And as always, Gerd Leonhard sums it up perfectly.
Update: Cnet has just revealed that apparently the silent videos are down to users choosing this option when informed of copyright infringement. It’s apparently been in place for a while, but is noticeable now because Youtube’s negotiations with Warners have broken down – and most of the music now muted belongs to the idiots Warners.
We’d still argue that it the users aren’t choosing to have their videos muted – they’re forced to choose between being muted or removed, because the music industry can’t work out that lots of people showing their appreciation of a piece of music might actually be an incredibly good promotional tool for that artist.
There are very few people who can save the record industry from their own idiocy, but unless they start following this chap, this chap, or these chaps, it seems like they’re locked into a race with newspapers for who can destroy their industry first.
Warner cuts of its own nose, then shoots both feet…
So Warner Music has ordered Youtube to pull all of it’s videos from Youtube in a dispute over royalties, stating:
“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.