Thing is, all those YouTube videos help sell albums of old artists. I bet if they tracked the rise and fall of old videos, they will find that their catalogue sales increase when a certain old video of some long forgotten act gets attention due to someone on YouTube infringing upon the copyright of some song and some old forgotten TV program.
Nobody uses YouTube as a jukebox, and it's not a replacement for having the music in a more usable format. Nor is the quality good enough that if you enjoy something on YouTube that if you really think it great, you would refrain from buying a DVD because you already got the images for free.
Rather than theft and infringement, the owners of intellectual property should view YouTube as the free advertising that it clearly is.
Intellectual property laws are overly restrictive and copyrights are maintained for an unreasonably long time.
The idiocy of music executives continues to be in full force
Morris related a frequent historical gripe often mentioned by music execs, saying the industry made a costly mistake in the 1980s when it agreed to give MTV free music videos. At the time, the industry saw the fledlging video trend as mere publicity to sell albums, rather than as a revenue generator itself.
"The poster child for this was MTV," Morris said. "Twenty-five years ago, they built a multibillion-dollar company on our software.
Many of the biggest selling albums of all time are 80s and early 90s recordings of middling quality that owe their popularity to all those videos that they 'gave away'. I'm guessing one of the reasons MTV no longer plays videos and has become all crappy reality TV, all the time, is that they'd rather produce low cost programming in house than pay large fees to advertise some other conglomerate's music acts.
No wonder all the folks wandering out of the UMG west coast headquarters down the street from me always look so depressed. They work for jerks like Doug Morris.
1 comment:
Thanks for this post and comment at Conblogeration.
Yes, the idiocy of music execs is amazing. I can't believe they don't see the return they get from free advertising via MTV and the 'net. That's the model they successfully used with radio, fer crying out loud.
I've added a link to Ernie Ford's work available through Amazon. How do you get those product boxes to show up? Does Amazon provide tags for that?
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