All that free music on YouTube is good for you, Google tells music biz

RBB, throwing sand in people's eyes, again!

Most artists only make between 0 and 3 things I want to hear

I find most musicians (around 99.99999%) produce 0 things I ever care about hearing ever.

Of the rest, I believe that most will make 1-3 tracks I would care for.

I have tried Spotify and will never move off their free tier because their discovery algorithm is pants. You liked something by artist X. Other users liked something by artist X. Those users also liked Y. You will like Y. Complete tosh. I spend my entire time trying to vote off the shit tracks by artist X that seem to be the primary handle for feeding me more dreadful shite by artist Y.

If their algo worked closer to track level it might help, but I've never seen any evidence, and 6 downvotes a day may not be enough to benchmark with, but I'm not prepared to even think of paying for a crap algo.

I used to spend a fair amount of time tuning Nokia's Mixradio so it didn't produce crap, but at least it could be tuned.

Youtube can't be tuned at all, but it's about as good as Spotify without the frustration because at least it's honest and doesn't make any grandiose algorithmic claims that are clearly BS.

So take your ball and go home

If you make music, it's going to get ripped off. Simple as. This is something that has been known about since portable recording devices have existed.

If you can't make money by making music, try doing something else instead.

The rules haven't even changed. This time, the other players drew better cards, is all.

It's not about "Making music"

It's about monetizing music. Copyright pays "Publishers" as much as writers, and in the states, performers get dern near nothing for actual recorded performances ("mechanicals"). The big labels control most publishing, and signing over your publishing rights to the label is boilerplate on most label contracts for artists.

"Free" (as in beer, and as in speech) music benefits almost all musicians other than the golden few that some label AR guy is currently supplying with hookers and blow. From a published, Grammy award winning musicians standpoint, Janis Ian's article "The Internet Debacle" is still relevant, even though it predates (and maybe predicts) the iTunes Store..

https://www.janisian.com/reading/internet.php

Music Videos

I like watching music videos. I find YouTube is currently the best place for this; in the 1980s -1990s MTV was best for music videos - I even used to tape 120 minutes; early 2000s it was Rage for me.

Now, when I'm watching music videos on YouTube I really hate it if I get a lyric video or some kind of static image - i.e. a lot of the user generated content, so I skip it.

Most recent music videos on YouTube seem to be on a channel associated with the artist / their label.

If music were to be taken away from YouTube, where would one go to watch the music videos?

I enjoy these PR pieces on behalf of the BPI.

Surely this article should come with "there now follows a party political broadcast on behalf of the music industry", where Andrew makes all kinds of strawman argument and fallacies to bolster his case.

Don't worry Andrew, the little brown envelope is in the usual dead drop.

No mention of how rights holders abuse there authority by taking down home videos of children and families because their "IP" is incidentally in the background? You know to balance out the reporting?

Why, of course not, it's all evil Google whose the big bad wolf, isn't it.

I mean, takedown notices for fair use? Absolutely not. Those poor innocent multi-nationals would never abuse their power like that. After all, they've stopped suing people for millions of a handful of songs on a torrent. So we should be forever grateful for their tolerance. It's not like they lobby governments to change the laws to make copyright infringement a criminal case like the TV industry has. We should be grateful for that I suppose.

Sorry Andrew, but the sympathy for the big music corps is non existent. Spew as much drivel as you like on behalf of your sponsors, we're not buying it.

Have a nice day. Hope you sleep well at night.

They Get What They Diserve

9, no make that 10 years ago, the Majors colluded with GooTube to put my company (redacted) and others out of business. We were the very first music video web site. I mean it the very fucking first. We were going gang busters with thousands of videos and millions of viewers. GooTube crushed us with the help of UMG and friends. We actually told that this would happen in our please not to kill us with ever more impossible terms until they finally just revoked our licenses. (Yes we paid them and they still shut us down for Gootube!).

VEVO was supposed to be their Trojan Horse. It backfired on them because, well, GooTube plays a much longer, more well funded, greedier, multi front, tech savvier, human nature based game.

My firm limped along for a few years with Indy music but eventually successful indies get bought by majors and guess what, even perpetual promotional permissions can be cancelled if you have enough lawyers.

We've all moved on except for the major labels apparently. They've got the monopoly Internet they deserve.

Name with held by common sense.