![]() It’s pretty hard to see why somebody would want to buy a live DVD of a U2 show when they can get the entire show in 1080p HD on YouTube. There are also endless ripped live DVDs and recorded TV broadcasts of live concerts (see figure 2). I doubt that the Beatles spent the best part of a decade not licensing to iTunes in order to suddenly throw it all straight up on YouTube. In the case of the Beatles all of the top results are full albums. The full album results are high lighted in red, many of which have hundreds of thousands of views each, in the case of Adele’s ‘21’ it is more than 1 million, and some have been live for more than a year. Take a look at these top search results for Adele, U2, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Beatles (see figure 1). ![]() If Google was a rights ally rather than a rights frenemy it wouldn’t solely wait to be told to take stuff down, at least for the really obvious and high profile stuff, but it doesn’t. In fact labels in the main do what they can to remove them using YouTube’s takedown process. Full length albums ripped into YouTube by users have no such benefit. A coherent argument can be made that 383 million views of Miley Cyrus’s ‘Wrecking Ball’ Vevo video delivered clear benefits to the artist and her team (both though direct Vevo advertising and the vast exposure). Nowhere is this approach more apparent in YouTube and the presence of user uploaded ‘full albums’. In other words Google talks the talk but only reluctantly so and it does the absolute minimum of walking the walk. Thus all the while Google is launching two music subscription services (Google Play Music All Access and the forthcoming YouTube offering) it is also lobbying for copyright reform and posting a link to for every successful copyright takedown. They pursue a do first, ask forgiveness later strategy. Rights frenemies strike a careful balance between maintaining good relations with rights holders on one side of their business but testing the limits on the other side. ![]() ![]() But the music industry should keep its aspirations in check, not just about the potential impact of the service, but also – and perhaps most importantly – because of YouTube’s intent. YouTube is now on the verge of launching a subscription product and this will hopefully go some way of addressing the fact it has made the marketing journey the consumption destination. YouTube has long been the digital music anomaly: hugely successful, almost free of criticism but with a pitifully small pay-per-stream rate (below half that of Spotify, who does get criticism, and some). ![]()
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December 2022
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