Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: karajorma on June 18, 2014, 02:24:59 am
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http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/17/youtube-indie-labels-music-subscription
Independent artists could disappear from YouTube "in a matter of days" after the Google video service confirmed it was dropping content from independent labels that have not signed up for its upcoming subscription music service.
YouTube is about to begin testing the new service – which will charge people to watch and listen to music without ads, and download songs to their mobile devices – within the next few days, initially within Google.
The company's head of content and business operations, Robert Kyncl, told the Financial Times that the service – previously rumoured to be called YouTube Music Pass – will launch more widely later in the year.
His confirmation that YouTube will block videos from labels that do not sign licensing deals for the new premium tier will be hugely controversial among indie labels, with trade body WIN already filing a complaint to the European Commission about its negotiating strategy.
"While we wish that we had 100% success rate, we understand that is not likely an achievable goal and therefore it is our responsibility to our users and the industry to launch the enhanced music experience," said Kyncl, claiming that YouTube has signed up labels representing 90% of the music industry.
Independent labels are likely to disagree. Their licensing agency Merlin estimates that indies collectively account for a 32.6% market share of the recorded music industry's sales and streams.
Contacted by The Guardian following his comments, WIN's chief executive Alison Wenham was blunt in her response. "They have suffered a simple but catastrophic error of judgement in misreading the market," said Wenham, who had organised a press conference earlier in the month to protest at YouTube's plans.
Wenham said YouTube was "setting itself up for failure" and only a small number of independent labels would agree to its terms.
"We have tried and will continue to try to help YouTube understand just how important independent music is to any streaming service and why it should be valued accordingly. Music fans want a service that offers the complete range of music available. This is something that companies such as Spotify and Deezer do, both of whom have excellent relationships with the independent music sector," she said.
WIN claims that the company has signed lucrative licensing deals with major labels Universal, Warner and Sony, while demanding that independent labels sign up to inferior terms or face having their videos blocked from YouTube's free service.
“Our goal is to continue making YouTube an amazing music experience, both as a global platform for fans and artists to connect, and as a revenue source for the music industry,” a Google spokesman said. He said the subscription-based service would bring new revenue streams “in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars YouTube already generates for them each year. We are excited that hundreds of major and independent labels are already partnering with us.”
Wenham's criticism echoes a claim made at the event by musician Billy Bragg, who said "I don’t know why they’ve opened this hornet’s nest right now, apart from corporate hubris. I don’t think they realise what a stupid thing they’ve done."
Artists including Adele, Arctic Monkeys and Jack White could see their videos taken down. The site has become a key promotional outlet for independent labels of all sizes in recent years.
YouTube attracts more than 1bn monthly viewers, with music one of its biggest categories. Its upcoming premium music subscription tier will compete with Spotify, Deezer and Napster among other services, including Apple-owned Beats Music and Google's own Google Play Music All Access.
Independent labels have long complained that they deserve more respect from digital music services negotiating licensing deals, and set up Merlin to strike deals on their behalf.
The agency has remained silent throughout the recent arguments about YouTube's planned new service, although its chief executive Charles Caldas criticised the company at an industry conference in late April.
Referring to an earlier quote from Bragg suggesting that musicians unhappy about royalties paid by Spotify should be "marching to YouTube central with flaming pitchforks", Caldas said: "I can’t say Billy’s right, but I can say that he’s not wrong."
The move comes as Amazon too has begun to flex its muscles in ways that limit the content its customers can receive. Amazon is delaying shipments and refused pre-orders for some titles from Hachette, publisher of Harry Potter author JK Rowling, and home to David Baldacci, Stephen Colbert, David Foster Wallace and others.
It has also pulled pre-orders for forthcoming Warner Home Video features, including international blockbuster The Lego Movie, 300: Rise of an Empire, Winter’s Tale and Transcendence.
So either you agree to get ****ed over by Google or you can't put up your music videos on there if you're not one of the big name publishers.
And if they succeed with this, I wonder how long it will be before YouTube Cat Video Pass becomes their next plan. :p
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I guess big companies are starting to think they can act like TV networks now just because they pull similar viewer numbers. What they're forgetting is most of the content that got them where they are was user-created. Being massive dicks to those same users probably isn't the best of ideas. But there's no way that someone in their management is so stupid, my guess is that someone's management term is about to expire and s/he wants to grab as much profit as fast as possible, long term profits be damned.m
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"continues to turn..."
lol
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Wouldn't that be pretty much be the end of YouTube? Just what does it mean "dropping contents from independent labels"? Are they going to go around and delete vids from everyone but paying musicians, or what? And what about videos from indie labels that were there, but not uploaded by their authors? Either way, it's no good for anyone. I hope they either come to senses, or someone else starts a competing service without this stupidity.
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What about covers, what about independent musicians, what about all the videos with music in them, what about ahem mashups of game soundtracks, what the foooook.
I did contact Dan Wentz for my mashup he not only approved of it, he complimented me on it. Is it now going to shreds because youtube decides to implode itself into the dark ages of the 20th century music industry?
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**** google.
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Perhaps this move only will ensure that more people go to Bandcamp.com (which is a great site if you are an indie artist/listener)
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Well, I'm gonna check it out. I'm a fan of Arany Zoltan, a folk musician from Hungary. He's on YT, of course, but I'm afraid he soon won't be anymore.
Also, what about the oldies? Clancy Brothers, for example, aren't gonna buy this stupid subscription, what with all of them being dead and all... I listen to a lot of music like that, and CDs of them don't even exist in many cases (and the vinyl records from 60s or so are usually collector stuff, rare and expensive. Not to mention I don't have a player).
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I'm a little confused as to whether this means that they will delete any indie tune on Youtube or just the official accounts and not let anyone monetise the unofficial uploads.
Dick move either way really though.
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When does somebody become an ARTIST?
Will a childrens birthday party vid be pulled because they sing the birthday song in good key?
What if there's a high school band of good calibre?
They are too loose in their terms.
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When does somebody become an ARTIST?
Will a childrens birthday party vid be pulled because they sing the birthday song in good key?
What if there's a high school band of good calibre?
They are too loose in their terms.
Actually, the "Happy Birthday to you" song is still under copyright and is subject to DMCA takedown just like any other song (and people/organizations have gotten in trouble for unauthorized public performance of it before).
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:nono:
I pity society.
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I don't really mind youtube content being strictly labeled, as long as I get access to it for free, with or without adds.
Independent creators that upload every piece of **** they want to youtube can gather their **** and flock to any of the other streaming sites.
If anything, this will only bring about the end of popular content in youtube. (I do believe however this will destroy youtube's goals for global conquest)
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Independent creators that upload every piece of **** they want to youtube can gather their **** and flock to any of the other streaming sites.
and people wonder why can't we have nice things... just look at this attitude...
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I'm a little confused as to whether this means that they will delete any indie tune on Youtube or just the official accounts and not let anyone monetise the unofficial uploads.
Dick move either way really though.
either way google loses out on the potential advertising revenue
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I never pay attention to the ads. Did anyone else?
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depends on what it's for
also let the ads run on monetised channels I watch frequently such as cynicalbrit
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ANy Ads I tend to ignore, sespecially on regular channels i watch such as Cynicalbrit. They repeat so often they have the opposite effect and put m eoff a brand.
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ANy Ads I tend to ignore, sespecially on regular channels i watch such as Cynicalbrit. They repeat so often they have the opposite effect and put m eoff a brand.
doesn't mean i pay attention to the ad when i let it run lol, in fact 90% of ads i don't pay attention to. as i say its the odd one or 2
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ANy Ads I tend to ignore, sespecially on regular channels i watch such as Cynicalbrit. They repeat so often they have the opposite effect and put m eoff a brand.
doesn't mean i pay attention to the ad when i let it run lol, in fact 90% of ads i don't pay attention to. as i say its the odd one or 2
That's what I said :yes:
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Speaking of Total Biscuit, the guy found out he has cancer apparently. Hopefully his chemo or whatever does the job. I'm not always in the mood for his videos and some of its a bit opinionated but he does give a lot of exposure for indie PC games and has introduced me to quite a few gems.
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I'm a little confused as to whether this means that they will delete any indie tune on Youtube or just the official accounts and not let anyone monetise the unofficial uploads.
Dick move either way really though.
Ditto. The article is confusing. I can't see them dumping all non-label music because it would be a massive decimation of the music videos on YouTube.
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They can do whatever the heck they want. Google got a monopoly on the video streaming business.
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http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/youtube-blocking-the-monetization-of-indie-labels-as-it-launches-paid-music-service.302985/
Here's a discussion on another forum concerning this issue. If this is to be believed, Google isn't totally removing indie labels, it's just preventing them from getting money via Youtube.
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i remember when youtube wasn't owned by google, and no one made money from it. oh, the good old days when having something of yours "go viral" could in NO way be considered a good thing.
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http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/youtube-blocking-the-monetization-of-indie-labels-as-it-launches-paid-music-service.302985/
Here's a discussion on another forum concerning this issue. If this is to be believed, Google isn't totally removing indie labels, it's just preventing them from getting money via Youtube.
That's the wrong way to do it.
Google is seriously, kind of ****ing dumb to be honest. If you want people to get in on your service, make your service appealing. Don't force them to go onto it by cutting back on existing services or freedoms. Same with google trying to shove G+ down everyone's throat and trying to force people to use their real name on google. And if you don't use your real name then the ****ers throw your username onto any emails you sent to gmail members instead of for example, respecting the name that comes with the email.
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That's why I use Inbox.com instead. It's a handy service, has a quite good interface, good functionality and 5GB capacity. Enough for my needs, and it's not owned by Google. :) I'm thinking about switching to Firefox from Chrome (also becaue Chrome is a memory hog, and the amount of tabs I usually keep open doesn't help). Now, if only there was a good independent search engine...
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That's why I use Inbox.com instead. It's a handy service, has a quite good interface, good functionality and 5GB capacity. Enough for my needs, and it's not owned by Google. :) I'm thinking about switching to Firefox from Chrome (also becaue Chrome is a memory hog, and the amount of tabs I usually keep open doesn't help). Now, if only there was a good independent search engine...
Or use whatever shared hosting you can afford :p
i pay mine something silly like 50€/year for 2gigs, domain, unlimited-ish bandwith + whatever the **** i want to do with dns for my domain :p
oh and however many email adressess on the domain as i can bother with :p
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Now, if only there was a good independent search engine...
What about DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/)?
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Now, if only there was a good independent search engine...
What about DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/)?
i've found it to be on the order of bing in useability honestly... its a glorious idea and definitely a good way to go, but in reality it proved to be just a little bit too useless...
(how i garnered that? i worked at a company which often had the SEO guys block us off of google/forcing us to enter googles captcha, so i switched to duckduckgo for a while... well... i turned back to entering google captchas after a month of trying)
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That's the problem with alternative search engines. They're nowhere near as convenient or usable as Google. If there was a comfortable, easy to use browser that queried other browsers (it's not impossible, from what I know) instead of searching directly, then I (and likely many others) would probably switch to it. I don't know about such a thing, though.
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That's the problem with alternative search engines. They're nowhere near as convenient or usable as Google. If there was a comfortable, easy to use browser that queried other browsers (it's not impossible, from what I know) instead of searching directly, then I (and likely many others) would probably switch to it. I don't know about such a thing, though.
You know what they say about the mother of invention. Now's a good time to make a replacement to what youtube was.
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That's the problem with alternative search engines. They're nowhere near as convenient or usable as Google. If there was a comfortable, easy to use browser that queried other browsers (it's not impossible, from what I know) instead of searching directly, then I (and likely many others) would probably switch to it. I don't know about such a thing, though.
You know what they say about the mother of invention. Now's a good time to make a replacement to what youtube was.
Unfortunately I can't remember what it was called and it might well have died, but I came across something that was exactly this, must have been at least a year ago. They were having trouble keeping the site going and having server problems and it was quite young, but essentially it was exactly the same as what old Youtube was, before they started changing things and making it worse, it was like when Youtube was still running with a 5 star meter instead of thumbs up or thumbs down.
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vimeo perhaps? it's the closest thing to a youtube competitor i've ever come across.
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Vimeo is pretty cool but they've targeted themselves as an artsy website and banned all game footage (in part, I believe, because they simply didn't have the server resources to handle all the game-related traffic they were getting).
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vimeo perhaps? it's the closest thing to a youtube competitor i've ever come across.
No, it wasn't Vimeo. It was set up almost exactly like old Youtube. Down to the layout, down to the 5 stars, the same comments section, and down to the old customisability we had of our channels, before that got stripped and only partners could personalise their channels.
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I found it. It was called Zippcast. It died... :(
(http://gettoptens.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Top-10-Best-YouTube-Alternatives-ZippCast.png)
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I admittedly am talking out of my arse here, but given the way tech startups work it's very likely YouTube wasn't significantly profitable for years after its launch, having been buoyed up by venture capital and then the Google buyout because it was set to corner the entire online video hosting market. New competitors don't have that luxury: they're never going to unseat YouTube, so they have to actually pull their own weight much quicker. This is why sites like the above that go for the same video hosting market end up going under in short order.
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Your ass seems spot on to me.
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Your ass seems spot on to me.
Quoting this because reading it out of context it's really a weird sentence to read. :)
/Offtopic