Google and Time Warner: How YouTube Stole My Friend's Career

I've got a buddy who is a very talented musician.  He has talked to several record companies, and they all have the same story:  we would love to sign you, but we just don't have any money to promote you and get you started.  Sales are down, profits are down, and they attribute a large portion of that lost revenue to illegal downloads.  It's a much different story when you remove huge companies from the subject line and replace them with a personal face and see how it affects the guys actually trying to make a living making music.

I read this today, and my jaw dropped.  The audacity here is simply baffling.

He said there are ways for the music industry to experiment and innovate in a way that still supports their core business of selling recorded music - he cited the YouTube buttons sending people to buy songs on Amazon as an example.

[via "Google boss denies 'screwing' music industry and defends YouTube in Warner row"]

By this same logic, this guy would justify Best Buy burning their own CDs of copyrighted music and handing them out for free with every purchase, as long as they include a link to Amazon's web site in the CD cover.  Or better, maybe Circuit City would still be in business if they would have burned copies of copyrighted DVD movies and handed them out for free with purchase so long as they included information on how to purchase a legitimate copy.  Wow, I am stunned.

He then goes on:

The people who upload videos aren't typically intellectual property experts. They just love the music. These people would have been the presidents of your fanclubs before. So do you punish them, yell at them, block their content from going up?

Umm... yes!  Certainly everyone agrees that content should be blocked if it is not properly licensed.  No, the people who upload videos aren't typically IP experts, but even kids in elementary school are taught about plagiarism... they know that they aren't supposed to do it, but they do it because the website allows them to.  It's not up to the individual, it's up to the site provider that is making tons of money from illegally shared content.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 22, 2009
  > they attribute a large portion of that lost revenue to illegal downloads Of course they would, it's the easiest thing to put blame on, and absolves them of any responsibility as well. How very convenient. As for "sales are down"... well duh... they're down in the entire world economy, and especially so in the luxury & entertainment industries. No surprise there, and these hard times are even harder for some.

• Anonymous
  January 22, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 22, 2009
  During the days of napster - people were uploading and sharing the music files themselves and hence were directly infringing the creator's rights. This is the reason that BestBuy cannot burn and give away music for free (as per your example). But YouTube brings in a brand new dimension to this issue. The videos typically contain user generated content - slide shows, home videos, etc.... This makes them derivative works or art... so are you saying that YouTube should block people from uploading their home videos just because they contain music from a CD? A big problem causing an issue here is that the law hasnt yet caught up with the technology. But in writing new laws, we have to be careful so that we dont stiffle creativity of the common joe. The following video is a good talk on this issue. Highly recommend you watching it.... http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 25, 2009
  You should really stick to your stance of not talking politics on a technical blog. You obviously don't know what you're talking about here and shouldn't unload your political views on your readers.

• Anonymous
  February 10, 2009
  If record companies could, they'd sue every kid who ever played a cd for his friend.  They want every song ever played outloud to generate revenue for them (as evidenced by an effort last year to charge RIAA public performance fees to local musicians covering signed artists in coffee shops).  There is (evident in this post, as well as generally in the Big Corporate Music Industry) a fundamental ignorance of promotion in the old media and its adherents that will inevitably lead to their demise, just as surely as there aren't many coopers around today who aren't employed by the liquor industry. If Joe puts up a video for this band he likes up on YouTube, an I am Joe's friend, I am likely to watch the video and see what all the fuss is about.  If I like it, I'll see about getting the CD from iTunes.  That is, in fact, exactly how I go about finding new music.  This generates revenue for the label and the musician.  (Or it WOULD generate revenue for the musician, if the labels paid anything out to the actual artist.)  Since my social network has moved out of the arcades, parking lots, and record stores of my youth and online, connecting members of that network to new media has also made the transition.  Record companies can't behind that, because they don't understand the evolution of social networking, and they're not creative enough to come up with new revenue streams. This Amazon thing mentioned, for instance.  The record co puts up a video on YouTube with a link to iTunes (to download the song/album) and Amazon (to the album page).  iTunes gives them a kickback via affiliate revenue, as does Amazon.  The record co should give a portion of that kickback to the artist.  When the clicker buys the album, they get a portion of that as a media purchase anyhow.  As an added benefit, for a customer going through an Amazon affiliate link, the affiliate gets 20% of everything they buy for 24 hours.  Not bad money on the small scale. That's really what we're talking about -- record companies have to learn to look at micro-income and reduce their overhead, rather than big purchase.  There's still resistance, for instance, to buying by the song through iTunes.  Backward, backward.  Artists have to learn not to depend on Big Labels for promotion, and self-promote.  They'll make more money during their growing popularity that way anyhow. There are also differences between Derivative Works and Fair Use, some of which applies to YouTube videos, but that's covered at length elsewhere. This is the first article on your blog I've read, for the record.  I'm not passing any judgement on your technical prowess based on this, but Mikael is probably right. (bv, http://neovore.com, http://flowmingle.com)

• Anonymous
  February 12, 2009
  The comment has been removed