Wednesday, January 14, 2009

The world falls silent as YouTube pushes mute button

In a bid to try and keep the record labels happy, YouTube have wiped the sound from a bunch of videos. A whole big bunch:

Ouch. This will really hurt. Everyone. The amateur film makers, the artists, Youtube, us - the users. Yes, sure, I know: synchronization [the use of music in a public audio-visual production] is subject to a license by the writer, publisher, label, artist (and another dozen of parties), no matter how small the use. That's the law.

If you didn't know better, you might surmise that Google was almost trying to reduce the popularity of YouTube as a catch-all video service in order to concentrate on the official videos which come with the copyright already sorted and much better chances of flogging lucrative adverts around. If you didn't know better.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you bump into a muted video on youtube, post this comment:

'We love music! We can't stand by silently while the music industry continues its decades-long effort to lock up our culture! If you think that it sucks that audio had to be disabled here BOYCOTT MUSIC INDUSTRY!

- Only buy audio-cds second-hand from now on (Use amazon's second-hand section or ebay from apparently private persons)

- Don't download from online music stores anymore

- Support self-marketing bands

- Spread this message here on every muted video you encounter'

Anonymous said...

They are so desperate.

They killed the audio from my band on a 20 year old video. I don't make any money from having it on YouTube, plus it promotes the song for them, since they decided to reissue our albums out of the blue [I also earn nothing from any sales].

I now own and control my recordings. Independent artists selling through online stores such as CDBaby earn directly, bypassing the labels. Also, download sales go directly to the artist, less a small commission.

Thanks for highlighting the issue. Much appreciated!

piper909 said...

I throw two big heavy shoes at those responsible for this latest outrage! Poster Susie is 100% right about this. Way to keep killing the music, industry weasels!

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