I spend a significant time wandering around aimlessly on YouTube. I watch a little bit of everything: music videos, video blogs, educational videos, and whatever else tickles my fancy at the moment. Just before writing this post, I came across a music video in which the record company (who posted the video) had disabled embedding. Obviously, this is an attempt to prevent viewers from posting the video on their blogs or Facebook pages. Personally, I see this as preventing word of mouth.
Sometimes people post their own videos and dub an appropriate song over the video. The record company may find these videos and take the audio track away, basically destroying the video. I understand that the record companies own the rights to these songs and therefore it is their right to regulate the use of said songs, but come on. Really. Isn’t that a bit too much? Some guy using your song for some silly video that he made in his spare time is not stealing revenue from anyone. Besides, in the music business, the majority of the profits does not come from record sales. It comes from tours and merchandise sales.
As a whole, the record company is light years behind the game. The world is changing, the economy is changing, the competitive environment is changing. In today’s marketplace, sometimes you have to give a little out for free. Some bands such as Nine Inch Nails and Wilco have released complete albums, free of charge. Radiohead did something similar when they allowed fans to name their own price for the band’s In Rainbows album. The Grateful Dead encouraged their fans to record their shows and share bootlegs with other fans. The Dead asked only that the fans refrain from selling the bootlegs.
I realize that record companies are likely scared of the Internet because of pirating and such. Regardless, if they are to survive, they must embrace the Internet when they can and utilize the appropriate features.
And so I leave you with a video that is very dear to me. This is a fan-recorded video from the first concert I ever attended: Radiohead at the Superpages.com Center in Dallas, Texas. The second song they played was “There There”. The atmosphere was amazing and the song had such an effect on the crowd. Luckily, since no one has yet taken this video down, I can share that moment with you. Who knows, maybe you’ll become a fan too. If not, it never hurts to try. It’s much better than a record company wasting money trying to advertise the song.
