Friday, March 06, 2009

Major video embedding disabled by YouTube's request

That official videos from the major labels on YouTube are useless, as you can't embed them, is something I've always assumed is the major's fault.

It turns out not, not entirely, as a deep throat has explained to MediaMemo:

I work at a major label and I’ve been told informally that embedding is disabled on our label’s YouTube clips because the deal terms negotiated with YouTube on our first licensing deal a couple years back demanded such large advance and per-stream payments that YouTube could only come close to the ad rates required to satisfy the terms by selling the advertising around the video, and not just on in-video overlays. So in the negotiation, YouTube told us only way we could get the terms we asked for was to disable the embedding on our videos.

Of course, the majors could have cut their cash demands, but chose not to - to the pain of their own digital marketing teams, who have seen their attempts to build artists through fan-sharing scuppered.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

All this will do is make more artists produce their own videos for smaller budgets so they can have control of passing their work around, like OK Go did with 'Here It Goes Again'; they were already signed on a major label and decided to make a viral video on their own anyway.

As everything we have learned with the internet, you cannot stop people from getting the info they want to get, they will find a way.

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