
Music World Bands Together Against YouTube, Seeking Change to Law - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/business/media/music-world-bands-together-against-youtube-seeking-change-to-law.html
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JoshTriplett
It amazes me that the music industry has the _audacity_ to complain that the
DMCA makes things _too hard_. If anything, the DMCA makes it _too easy_ to
take down content. And YouTube then makes it even easier than the DMCA, and
harder to restore content after faulty takedowns.

This time around, I hope the computing industry and the user-generated content
industry are big enough to just say "no, go away and don't ask again".

~~~
nemothekid
The major labels try to frame the discussion around piracy, which confuses
everyone else because YouTube bends over backwards when it comes to copyright
law.

If you dig deeper, its not about piracy - its about control. What do the
majors get from Spotify/Apple music that they don't get from YouTube? If the
majors don't like their deal with Spotify (whether its 80% of the revenue, or
no free listeners), the majors can walk, and if any of their music appears on
Spotify, the majors can sue them out of existence.

With YouTube it's different -

1.) YouTube is the largest streaming site so users will always look for music
there

2.) Anyone can upload music to YouTube

3.) YouTube isn't financially responsible when someone uploads infringing
material.

These 3 factors mean, if the majors decide they want 80% of YouTube's revenue
rather than 50% and YouTube walks, there is a chance (more like a given) that
someone will upload Taylor Swift's new album on there pitch shifted by 13% (to
evade content id), and will go on to generate millions of views. And since
YouTube is protected by the DMCA, the majors can't sue them out of existence.
_That 's_ why the majors hate the DMCA, as it applies to YouTube. There
effectively isn't a "scorch-earth" policy for music on YouTube, and the majors
can't leverage their army of lawyers to force YouTube to submit to them if
"scorch-earth" fails.

Now I doubt "we need to kill the DMCA so we can sue YouTube for billions" is
very PR-friendly, but "muh piracy" always is.

~~~
desde_mona
Paying someone to be an artist is like paying someone to be an alcoholic, and
the more I hear Artists collectively complain about the lifestyle I'm failing
to enable, while I sit lashed to a desk all day, the more I want to destroy
their every dream and aspiration.

~~~
ehnto
You seem to be lambasting what you see as entitled behavior, while making it
very clear that you are simply bitter that they live a life you either don't
agree with or perhaps, are envious of.

Either way it isn't up to you to decide who will pay for what, and your
assumption that every artist is a drunken freeloader is clearly false. Most
working artists also have to hold down a job and will get very little in
return for their efforts.

They aren't providing nothing, and very clearly people want what they are
providing. It takes time, effort and opportunity costs to produce music and to
expect that it be given to you for nothing because you think it's frivolous is
ridiculous.

Do you pay for DVDs? Pay to see movies? What about the artwork on your
clothing, or the design of your car? You pay for all of those things directly
or indirectly and they could all be considered frivolous in one way or
another, yet someone worked hard to make it happen and people are willing to
pay for that.

~~~
simplexion
Recorded music is the advertising for the musician. I don't understand why I
should pay for that advertising. What they are advertising is their ability to
perform music and they will receive my money when I pay to watch them perform
or purchase their merchandise.

EDIT: Let me elaborate in regards to ehnto's argument. DVDs, clothing and cars
are all physical items I am paying for and therefore I am happy to pay for
that. I am also happy to pay to see a movie because movies could not exist
prior to being able to film. Movies are the end product that I want to see.

All of these are different to music. Music existed well before the ability to
record it did. All that recording did was make it more accessible. Back when
you had to purchase a record or CD there was a physical item you ended up with
to listen to that music. Therefore something that was worth paying for. I
bought a lot of CDs. The music is not the end product. The live show where I
go to see the musician perform is.

I don't get paid for people to use my work without any involvement from me
past the fact I created something. Why should a musician be paid for you
listening to the music they created. They aren't putting in any hours for me
to hear that past the original creation. What are they getting paid for?

This is why I love artists like Hoodie Allen and Chance the Rapper. They
release the majority of their music for free. Hoodie Allen was unable to
release one of his albums for free on iTunes, so he charged the minimum. He
was constantly on social media telling people they can download his album for
free from multiple locations and that they didn't have to buy it on iTunes.
People still paid for that album like crazy.

On that note... fuck the music industry.

~~~
zambal
I think your view of records is a bit unfair.

> I am also happy to pay to see a movie because movies could not exist prior
> to being able to film.

I am happy listening to records, because records could not exist prior to
being able to record. See, some album music is really unique in its own right
and could not be easily reproduced live. The same as some movies could not
easily be translated to a theater play.

> I don't get paid for people to use my work without any involvement from me
> past the fact I created something. Why should a musician be paid for you
> listening to the music they created.

Isn't it a bit the same as with software? When I buy some software, the
developers also aren't putting any hours for me at the moment I'm using it.
Still, most people are ok with paying for software.

~~~
collyw
You can get plenty of software for free. Most people I know seem to have dodgy
or OEM installed versions of software, and use free products on top of that.
The ones who do pay for software usually have it paid for by their work.

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chatmasta
The self-proclaimed* music world, aka mainstream leftovers and special
interest mouthpieces. What about all the artists who would be nowhere without
YouTube? Like Justin Bieber, for example.

~~~
Natsu
Their videos will probably get taken down by someone else claiming to own
them, if history is any guide.

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vonklaus
what if they banded together and competed. i don't want to trvialize it but
youtube is annoying as fuck.

* pointless comment system

* inability/difficult to just get audio, especially mobile

* horrible search experience

* weird channel/user ui

* many features/services that come and go. youtube red, other premium services, i actually saw a new one today

* mobile app

i am not saying baseline piracy should be allowed, but as other saas and
consumer services become much cheaper, it becomes easier to buy than steal.
finding and curating an entire music library is simple and 9.99 on apple and
spotify. netflix and prime provide video media more consistently and with less
of a hassle than torrenting it due to integration, speed and lack of adware.
just roll out the fucking content and let people buy it. if you sue google and
take it down, and it can't be immeadiately torrented, that artists music
immeadiately won't exist to 60% (prob greater) of the people listening.

also, DMCA makes no fucking sense. i cant find the link but random 3rd parties
just issue takedowns and get and keep advert revenue. i am against google and
youtube being essentially sole purveyors of search and media, but I feel for
the people running these services. how do you verify and moderate millions of
request? this might even be per hour at this point. last thing this needs is
to be changed. either scrap it or keep it, i'd be too scared to see what would
happen if this got amnended even with good intentions

~~~
tgb
The comment system apparently appeals to a lot of people, just not you or I.
It's probably better for the artists to have that than not.

If you pay for Youtube Red / Google Play Music, you can get audio only easily
on mobile. That's actually why I started subscribing, though now I use it
mostly on my laptop. It's essentially 100% covered my music needs since I
started.

The search actually seems pretty good to me. I generally find what I want very
quickly even with typos, etc. Do you have specific thoughts about it?

UI can definitely be a little wonky for say, browsing a channel I frequently
can't find what I want without searching. And the damn auto-playing video on
the channel page! I end up having to stop it playing four or five times in
short succession the way I use the page.

Anyway, opinions differ.

~~~
pluma
YouTube Red is not available everywhere (or even US-only at the moment, I
think?) and Google Play Music is a completely unrelated (though excellent)
service.

Also, YouTubers complain more about the comment system than the people
commenting do. There's a reason many videos these days have comments disabled.
There was also a lot of negativity when the comment system was changed as part
of the Google+ rollout. The commenting system is really only useful for the
channels when considered in aggregates -- there's barely any point in trying
to hold individual conversations -- it's worse than Twitter. Maybe NLP and
sentiment analysis could be used to build moderation/analytics tools to
improve that use case.

The UI is nice but wonky. As a web developer myself I frequently look at
YouTube as an example for what kind of sloppy UX you can get away with in a
billion dollar flagship product. It's also gone through several even worse
iterations (e.g. the dreaded keep-video-playing-when-you-navigate-away
"feature" that was supposed to emulate the behaviour of the mobile app).

As an example for a current mis-feature of YouTube (i.e. something intentional
they had to actually go out of their way to develop): volume and speed are
saved (less or more reliably) and persisted globally and indefinitely if you
change them. Listened to a couple of talks on 1.5x or 2x yesterday? Now all
the music videos you're watching are sped up too. Had to turn the volume way
up on that video podcast? Better turn it back down before the next video's
incredibly loud conference jingle comes up.

These features as they are only make sense if you use YouTube for precisely
one thing and one thing only. The second you approach it with different use
cases the features become annoying and distracting.

~~~
tgb
Google Play Music and Youtube Red aren't unrelated, at least in the US: you
buy one you get the other. For all practical purposes for me, they're just
different features of the same product and are actually integrated (you can
play songs from Youtube in Google Play Music). I'd never have bought Youtube
Red, but getting it in a bundle of features is nice.

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peterkshultz
I opened the article expecting the music industry to have caught wind of
youtube-dl.

I was wrong.

------
Artistry121
It is strange. It seems like all of the artist mentioned have Official Youtube
Pages where they post their own videos and music - if they don't want to be on
youtube why not take those videos off the site?

~~~
NEDM64
If they don't do, people will upload the full albums and people will listen to
those copies. So better put there their songs.

Also, YouTube is a monopoly. It's the Microsoft Windows of online media
distribution. Developers cannot afford to not release their software for
Windows, now imagine if Microsoft decided to build an AppStore like iOS where
they decided unilaterally the price of software and their cut, and it were
dirty cheap! Damned if you didn't develop for Windows, damned if you did.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> If they don't do, people will upload the full albums and people will listen
> to those copies. So better put there their songs.

And the world's smallest violin will play a royalty-free sad song for them.

YouTube already has a huge pile of mechanisms above and beyond the DMCA to
automatically identify and take down content. If you don't want your music
anywhere on YouTube, you can use those tools, which YouTube doesn't _have_ to
provide at all, but which they provide because they want to make business
deals with major labels.

Personally, I'd love to see YouTube just drop all access to those tools for
anyone not on their platform, and labels can go back to filing individual DMCA
requests by registered letter.

------
simplexion
By "music world" do they mean record labels and musicians signed to record
labels?

~~~
pessimizer
I thought it was a store like Guitar Center. It's just the massive media
conglomerates that own us all speaking under a few of their brands. They're
fighting the tech companies that make all their money from getting between
every communication and collecting rents, and blaming everything that goes
wrong on one of the endpoints.

"Mommy, the capitalists are fighting again!"

"Don't worry baby, we'll just send our check to whoever wins..."

Vivendi was started as a municipal water company by Napoleon's nephew, also
Napoleon.

------
ryanobjc
The comparison of vinyl vs YouTube I suspect is deliberately misleading. Since
vinyl has manufacturing costs, if their $471m figure was revenue, it was the
incorrect value to use. The gross margins are typically 50% or in that area +-
10%.

Whereas the YouTube revenue has a gross margin of 100%.

So very apples and oranges.

~~~
golergka
Hosting is free now?

~~~
seanp2k2
Certainly orders of magnitude less than producing vinyl and selling it in
brick-and-mortar stores. The size of YouTube videos is in the singles-to-tens-
of-MB. [http://www.cdncalc.com](http://www.cdncalc.com) suggests delivery
costs for commercial for-profit General-purpose CDNs are on the order of 5
cents per GB. YouTube has absolutely massive scale and their own CDN POPs
deployed, so I wouldn't be surprised if their costs are a small fraction of
this price. However, even at a generous 10MB per video and retail CDN
bandwidth cost of 5 cents per GB, delivery of one play of one song is about
would cost one twentieth of one cent. I'm sure they're making much more than
this for the ad which plays before the video. YouTube also has employees and
infrastructure and other costs, but they don't disclose their financials, so
it's hard to know exactly how much they spend on hosting:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/google-cfo-doesnt-disclose-
yo...](http://www.businessinsider.com/google-cfo-doesnt-disclose-youtube-
financial-results-2015-7)

All that said, digital distribution tends to be drastically cheaper than
physical distribution to the point where it's essential free, and a negative
cost once ad revenue is factored in.

For a vinyl analogy, imagine Starbucks was paying 1000x the cost of
distributing a record if someone went to Starbucks after seeing the ad which
was slipped inside the record cover.

Another consideration: YouTube makes so much on ads that they're _giving some
of that money back to content producers_ because they know that the service
they provide is so readily available for free elsewhere that producers need
additional incentives to use YouTube specifically.

I'm fairly confident that their ad share payouts exceed their bandwidth costs.

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bluesign
YouTube is not so honest I guess tbh, instead on forcing artists for contentID
sign up, they can as well at first DCMA request calculate contentID, and block
all current and future violations automatically, and artists don't have to
send DCMA for every violation

