Record Industry Blues: You Tube monetisation and the making money not lawsuits equation

Sunday 2 August 2009

You Tube monetisation and the making money not lawsuits equation

For the longest time, the rule of thumb on the internet regarding the record industry has been, "do wrong, get punished". The overwhelming example is downloads, but has also extended to remixes or mashups, as well as an unauthorised soundtracks in video clips on sites like YouTube.

This rule of thumb seems to have been turned on its head recently with the phenom that is "JK Wedding Entrance Dance". As everyone knows by now, this video used the track "Forever" by disgraced "urban artiste" Chris Brown as its raison d'etre. YouTube's "please don't sue us out of existence" olive branch to record labels up until this point has been to disable the audio of videos that contain non-cleared samples, of which this is a stunning case.

For some reason, this video was posted unaltered and the record label instead chose to implement a new YouTube feature that allows click to buy links to appear in the video itself.

YouTube have documented the whole thing themselves in a case study revolving around the wedding video.

It would be nice to see the free flow of creativity allow to continue unabated and maybe throw the labels a little cash for ... hmm, no work.

Let's face it, anything we as fans do creatively is free marketing for this industry that really can't/hasn't/probably won't ever get it's act together. An industry that's only original idea in the last decade is to sue the very people it's trying to market to really needs to have its brain examined. The Inquisitor goes a step further and pulls a strip from Google for letting this happen, saying "Google’s response to the Wedding Dance video is nothing to be proud of."

Still, it's nice that somehow YouTube were able to keep the neanderthal wolves from the door, even if it is at the expense of its user's content.

Image via CrunchBase