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".
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.
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.
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.
That's not what the GP said, he said he wanted to see these artists go under, which is another matter. I feel the much the same way about artists who lobby for insane surveillance and trivially abusable laws because they feel they aren't paid what they're entitled to.
"Do you pay for DVDs? Pay to see movies? What about the artwork on your clothing, or the design of your car?"
1. No.
2. No.
3. What "artwork" on my clothing? Everything I have is for work, white or blue collared shirts. Occasionally I'll be really wild and do something in plaid!
4. Don't have a car and I won't support the consumer vehicle industry. I use mass transit, thanks.
Your shirts were at some point designed by someone even if they have no artwork. The point is that creatives are involved in many facets of life that are not always obvious, and they are exerting man hours to create those things. Most of the time the creatives are paid up front, such as a car designer. But for music that's not the case, so the money to pay for their man hours has to come from somewhere and that somewhere is gigs, merchandise and royalties.
The system is sometimes convoluted but eventually the money comes out of the consumers pocket. The point I'm trying to make is simply that at least some of those dollars should make it back to the creator.
In theory that's what copyright is designed to make happen. I don't have as much of a problem with people getting stuff for free, they probably wouldn't have paid for it anyway. It's more about those who are making money off the artist without giving any back, and you could argue that Youtube does that if a musicians music is available for free and they are generating indirect revenue from advertising across the site.
If I know I can get a song on YouTube, I'll hit their home page, get an advertisement, then go to the song. They have profited from hosting the song in that example. They don't advocate or allow it, but it happens and the artist gets nothing for something while Youtube gets something for nothing.
the money to pay for their man hours has to come from somewhere
Actually no, it doesn't have to come from somewhere. It's quite possible that we'll go back to a world where musicians aren't generally paid, except for a few who are paid up-front by rich patrons. That's pretty much how it was until the 20th century.
If it doesn't come from somewhere, it doesn't exist.
When you write that it doesn't have to come from somewhere, you are just arguing that costs (time/money) will be born by the musicians themselves. Basically a donation to society.
Your conflating money with the thing it pays for. They are not equivalent.
I make all sorts of cool art for free. No money, comes from nowhere, sometimes I pay for materials or prints. The printers aren't the creative ones (if they dare I'll take my work somewhere else next time). Then I give them away (because birthday presents are hard).
And sometimes I make music but you can't give that to people, which very neatly describes the whole problem in a microcosm: You can give someone a performance but that's ephemeral, a one time thing (and only if I were good enough that'd be passable birthday present and even if I were a rockstar, after a while you gotta ask yourself wtf you're doing and why). You can give someone a recording but that's worthless because it's just information which has near zero value--and IMHO it's completely ridiculous to expect people to pretend otherwise (unless that's the art but then it's not music and let's not get into the art of pranksterism right now).
The other option is they stop making music--haha! Seriously, who is going to make them stop?? Some wise people once said it takes a nation of millions to hold them back (maybe they meant something else, but they also meant this). Another wise person once said that we are nothing but the sum of our parts and that which we give away for free.
So there's music that is not going to be made if you don't INSERT COIN. Then there's music that builds from divine pressure (wise person said "can't touch this") and forces its way out no matter what. Cry me a river if we lose the former, thanks to technology, it'll just create space and breathing room for the latter.
For that matter, most of my shirts don't have artwork--I like casual button-downs for everyday wear; but I look for striking colors, interesting fabric patterns, etc. I'm not pushing any personal style in particular, but it's a shame if there's nothing in your closet but work clothes.
Why? The only clothes I use with prints are ones with imagery from my favorite games, the rest are just single colored or have simple patterns. Some people like it that way!
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.
> 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.
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.
>The music is not the end product. The live show where I go to see the musician perform is.
Hey, how much of all the music you listen to you listen live? One percent perhaps? Don't be hypocritical please. Without recording you wouldn't get a chance to hear the best musicians from around the world.
Also a lot of people don't see or don't care about the difference between recording and live performance. For them music is the end product.
You shouldn't pay for advertising if you don't want to. The issue is that, as the creators of the work, artists have the right to decide what they want to charge for access to their creation.
You do not have a right to access that content without paying whatever price it is the artist has decided to charge.
If any artist WANTS to release their music for free, they can. If they do not want to release their music for free, they can also do that.
As far as I see it, the big media companies are the cause for most of their troubles. To a large part through resisting better business models, and through forcing themselves into the position as gatekeepers.
Artists should be supported, but I can't see any sane justification for letting them dictate the terms for how a society may interact with its own culture.
That's a very convenient excuse. Media companies can't actually force themselves into that position. Artists have to sign contracts with them voluntarily.
That's a very naive way of looking at it. Why do you think artists historically have felt they had no other choice than to do so? (hint: they control the vast majority of the distribution and PR)
What about recoupment contract terms and similar unjust practices?
That is a very paternalistic way of looking at it.
You are effectively saying to artists, shut up, you have no right to sign contracts or have your voluntary agreements respected because you are too exploited to know what's good for you. And now step aside and let me download all your stuff for free until we have sorted out all the warts of media business models, capitalism and the universe in general.
We all face constraints and we are not completely free in the choices we make. That doesn't mean the choices we do make can simply be discounted.
Why are you calling it paternalistic, instead of anti-monopolist?
You're essentially excusing slave trade where people sell themselves to become slaves "because they could choose not to", when they actually in the real world couldn't see any other viable option for survival.
And while at it you're blatantly ignoring (or perhaps obscuring) the other option, of targeting the other side of the equation and banning such exploitative contracts, requiring that they offer reasonable terms instead. Are you claiming it is impossible for them, who keep making record profits, to afford to be fair?
Because you are talking over artists' heads like they were little children unable to understand how enslaved they are.
If an artist says, I feel enslaved (and some probably do), I take that seriously, and I would have a very close look at those contracts.
But if an artist says I am acting voluntarily and I demand restrictions on free music downloads, and a consumer of music such as yourself says no you are being enslaved and therefore I feel entitled to free music downloads in the name of fighting big bad media companies, then that is too obviously self-serving for me to take at face value.
The artists are prioritizing their careers first, can't afford great lawyers when they're fresh (so they don't actually know how horrible the contracts are!), and everybody keeps telling them it is harder to succeed alone.
How can't you understand the effects of that? Are laws against lies in advertisement also paternalistic?
And why in the first place do you even believe that piracy is a problem that can be solved legally? Why do you believe it even should be solved using the law? Why should the mere request of the media companies be sufficient to put people in jail!?
You are making a lot of unfounded assumptions about what I believe.
I'm not defending any particular contractual structure. I'm not arguing against banning specific types of contracts. I'm not calling for excessive punishment for copyright infringement or for a surveillance state to enforce copyrights.
I'm saying that artists can be trusted to understand their own situation and act in their own interest, possibly with the help of lawyers or organisations that support them.
If some of them come to a conclusion that is different from yours, you can't just go ahead and declare them mentally incapacitated. That is what I call paternalistic and it is actually a rather moderate way of putting it.
Artists are not enslved imbecils who need to be protected from themselves. They may need to be protected from others, but that is something they need to diagnose themselves and make demands accordingly (some certainly do that).
Our societies are moving pretty quickly in a direction where we take away people's freedom to enter into voluntary agreements with other adults based on the claim that they are in a forced situation and can no longer be trusted to speak for themselves. Just look at prostitution, smoking, gambling, foreign currency loans, variuos fetishes, assisted suicide, etc.
Yes there are situations in which people need to be protected from themselves and their inability to grasp their own situation. But these situations are exceedingly rare. There should be a very high threshold before coming to that conclusion.
> I'm saying that artists can be trusted to understand their own situation and act in their own interest
I'm saying this indeed is wrong in 90% of the cases because the big media companies are intentionally deceptive, and control the message that the artists are getting. Try reading a bunch of blogs of musicians getting fed up by the companies - they're easy to find, and most of yet stories are very similar. They're promised everything and get nothing.
> possibly with the help of lawyers or organisations that support them.
I'm saying this is a necessity with independent organizations that actually care about the individuals, because right now they don't have that kind of support.
>I'm saying this indeed is wrong in 90% of the cases because the big media companies are intentionally deceptive, and control the message that the artists are getting.
And what makes you so uniquely positioned that you cannot be deceived and the information you have access to is not tightly controlled by these supposedly omnipotent media bosses?
I haven't heard anything from you that makes me believe in your superior insight compared to the people who signed the letter the NYT is reporting on.
Artists talk to each other you know. If 10% knew some super secret truth about the media business, the other 90% would quickly learn about it.
I'm afraid you'll have to accept that there are different opinions out there and not everyone who disagrees with you has had wool pulled over their eyes.
Has it occurred to you that the reality may be more nuanced so that reasonable people can disagree? Or that media conglomerates and their business models may be one problem that artists have and copyright infringement on a massive scale another one on top of that?
Looking up recoupment in the music industry is infuriating on its own, it isn't far from modern day slavery. Control over PR budgets is another one, and shitty royalties is a major one.
If you spend a few hours looking up those leads, I sincerely doubt you'll still think I'm misguided or not educated enough afterwards.
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.
That's a very limited view of music. Tons of music/audio workers out there neither sing nor play live instruments. Songwriters, composers, electronic musicians, recording engineers, mixers, Foley artists, etc. To them, recording is their only product.
Definition of musician: a person who writes, sings, or plays music.
If their work is only a recording they can make money off of donations. This is how it works in my example of Hoodie Allen. He was directly telling his fans they could download his album for free and they were still paying for it.
I truly don't see how anything you have said here detracts from what I said.
> 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.
No. Just no. Concerts and merchandise are lame excuses for people who prefer not to pay for music. You don't decide what the artist is selling.
In most cases the album is the actual product. You may see it as an advertisement, but it has a very real price tag attached. If you don't want to pay for it, fine - but please don't feel entitled to it because you attended a concert or bought a shirt.
Furthermore, do you realize that not every artist is a rock band? An ambient artist releases intended for home listening, may have a hard time
a) selling t-shirts to a mature audience that isn't all that interested in colorful prints on hip shirts
b) filling anything but the smallest venues since the music might be less suited for clubs and stadiums compared to that band you probably had in mind
> 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?
I can't believe how naive this sounds. You probably don't sell any kind of digital good, do you? Would you say the same thing about software, apps, books? The artist put a lot of hours into the original work and that's what you pay for.
Do you think you paid for the medium or the distribution process back when you bought CDs? That was a fraction of the price.
> On that note... fuck the music industry.
The music industry is much more than the handful of major labels. There are countless small, caring and niche labels that absolutely have the interests of artists and listeners in mind in everything they do. Your view is very narrow in that regard.
They want what they have long wanted: to push responsibility for enforcement onto someone else.
The problem is that no one else can tell what is and is not authorized. Copyright relies on permission and the copyright owner (and only the copyright owner) has any idea to whom they have and have not given permission.
Granted, as the Viacom lawsuit against YouTube once proved, even they can get that horribly wrong, but anyone else has even less knowledge to act upon, which should not be encouraging.
I'm sure they see that the DMCA spammers are rather ineffective at doing anything but taking their money, which no doubt upsets them, but the level of censorship and preapproval for speech that would be necessary to actually enforce copyright is, in fact, quite draconian.
Given how easy it is to quite literally steal someone's video (that is, by both taking it and depriving them the use thereof) with ContentID and how many times something like that has actually happened, I can only fear what might come to pass were they given their wish.
> The problem is that no one else can tell what is and is not authorized. Copyright relies on permission and the copyright owner (and only the copyright owner) has any idea to whom they have and have not given permission.
It goes even further than that: there are completely legitimate uses for which the copyright owner hasn't given permission, and their permission is neither requested nor required. YouTube's "Content ID" doesn't take fair use into account at all.
In the sense that DMCA complaints are presumed valid, you are correct.
In the sense that the company has plenty of time before they are required to respond to a complaint, it is the opposite, obviously no number of DMCA complaints would, by themselves, stop a popular song from being available on YouTube.
Only contentID can do that, and YouTube deploys ContentID at their discretion while being protected by the DMCA from lawsuits.
So when all is said and done DMCA is a real pain for regular people, while not providing the protection which was intended.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
You can avoid the auto-playing video stuff in Firefox with the media.autoplay.enabled setting. It makes things slightly awkward, since web apps assume autoplay will work, but avoids that dumb problem.
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?
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.
> 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.
Let's run with the Windows analogy for the moment.
Microsoft did make an iOS-like Windows Store with a standardized cut, though they did let developers have control over pricing. And they bundled it with Windows 8, gave Windows Store apps access to new APIs and generally pushed it as hard as they could. It hasn't gone anywhere (at least not so far).
So let's say YouTube has Windows-like market power. Just like Microsoft, they still don't get everything they want. The other side of the table (artists or developers) has market power too - they own the rights to their music or apps. There's nothing stopping them from putting their official presence somewhere else (Facebook, Amazon, Vimeo, ...) and issuing takedowns for everything that shows up on YouTube. That they don't do this is a pretty strong indication that the deal they're getting isn't actually that bad (especially since YouTube's competitors would happily given artists all sorts of incentives to switch to help build their user base).
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.
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%.
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 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...
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.
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
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".