These days many studios and networks are houses divided against themselves: the legal department on one side and the marketing department on the other. As lawyers dry out their tongues licking stamps for cease-and-desist notices, other companies are getting wise to YouTube’s potential. MTV2 shows preview videos on the site, and E! uses it as a tie-in with its clip show, The Soup. Hollywood Records, trying to promote its Queen DVD, put the band’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” video on the site. (In a nifty bit of cross-promotion, the clip also encouraged viewers to tune in to Fox’s American Idol, one episode of which featured contestants singing Queen songs.) The Weinstein Company partnered with the site to show trailers and other promo material for flicks including Scary Movie 4 and Clerks II.
YouTube just secured a second round of funding: $8 million of venture-capital green. “That allows us to expand on all fronts: marketing, sales, infrastructure, being able to build out our data centers around the world,” says Supan, adding, “We’re seeing a huge cultural shift happening right now in digital-media entertainment and how it’s being distributed.”
This is not Napster redux. Unless it’s taken down, or dismantled and built up again as a corporate portal for pay video — as Napster was for music — YouTube is not going away anytime soon. And the sheer volume of it all makes the idea of scrubbing away all the cool (and copyrighted) stuff unrealistic. In the meantime, people are watching.
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THEY WERE THERE FIRST: Gnarls Barkely's “Crazy,” the UK’s first number-one single based on digital sales alone, was available via The Hype Machine way back in October.
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And then there’s music
The still-new but suddenly omnipresent phenomenon of mp3 blogs is a fraught and murky area. But for now, at least, it looks as though the big record companies may have learned some lessons since Napster first appeared in 1999.
By strict letter of the law, of course, most people who maintain mp3 blogs enable copyright infringement. But there are differences, hardly insignificant, between the blogs and the file sharing so loathed by the RIAA. They have to do with scale and intent.
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For one thing, even though there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bloggers out there, most uploading several songs every day (compared with the massive number of songs downloaded on file-sharing networks), the traffic the sites attract is small peanuts. For another, even though mainstream stuff is easy to find, for the most part the songs made available on mp3 blogs are from indie artists and are hardly the massive unit movers the RIAA presumably spends the most time fretting about.
Most important, the name of the game here isn’t to get as much stuff as you possibly can for free: it’s to spread the word about new artists and new albums. The blogs almost always make the songs available for just a limited time (a week, maybe two); include links to online retailers such as Amazon.com, eMusic, and iTunes to facilitate purchase of the full album; and post a disclaimer. “Please go out and buy the records!” reads the notice posted on Said the Gramophone, one of the first and best mp3 blogs. “All songs are removed within a week or two of posting. If you are the copyright holder of any song posted here, please contact us if you would like the song taken down early.”
But as it happens, some copyright holders — even the Big Five record companies — are quite happy to have their songs on blogs. In 2004, when the medium was still in its infancy, the New York Times reported that Warner Brothers Records sent an mp3 from the new record by the Secret Machines to eight music bloggers. “They are an indie rock band and we would love for people to hear the band’s music from your site,” an employee, Ian Cripps, wrote. “Here it is, listen to it and let me know if you will post it.”
One blog, Music for Robots, took Warner Brothers up on it. Before long, in the comments section, a few user reviews cropped up that looked a little disingenuous. “I never heard these guys before, but theyre [sic] awesome,” wrote one listener. “I went to their website and you can listen to a lot of ther [sic] other stuff, very cool andvery [sic] good!” Later, that comment and others were found to have come from an IP address used by Warner Music.
When the Phoenix asked the RIAA about its stance on mp3 blogs, we were supplied with the following statement via e-mail: “If artists, record companies, publishers and others choose to use music blogs to distribute their music, that is their choice and we think that’s a great thing. It is important that bloggers respect the value of music by obtaining the appropriate licenses from the copyright owners, or their designees.”