OK, I am an Amanda Palmer fan. I enjoyed her work with the Dresden Dolls and when she went solo I was worried that it would be a disappointment. I was wrong, her album ‘Who Killed Amanda Palmer’ kicked ass and the videos of ‘Astronaut’, ‘Guitar Hero’, and ‘Runs in the Family’ were great.
Amanda has a channel on youtube where her videos were. I say were because Warner bullied youtube into taking all music videos from Warner (and its subsidiaries)in and effort to exort cash from google. Cash that even if they got not a penny would go to the artists.
In this day and age, small artists need things like youtube, websites, and myspace to get their music across. Warner is still stuck in the stone age.
I am pissed. I cannot see videos that VH1 and MTV would never show in a million years even if they actually showed videos anymore.
Oh, dude…I feel sorry for the Warner execs. I would NOT want Amanda pissed off at me…I can’t help but believe she’s got diagrams of thousands of elaborate revenge tortures that she came up with in quiet moments (sitting on the toilet, in lieu of singing in the shower, etc) that she’d be more than happy to test out on anyone who managed to piss her off. I mean, I absolutely love Amanda, but she seems like one woman you definitely don’t want to be on the wrong side of.
Yeah, Moby did a rant about this in his MySpace blog. He pleads with Warner to leave his videos up on YouTube, and apologized to his fans in advance if they didn’t listen to him.
Aside: I just learned of Amanda Palmer a week ago, and I immediately went out and bought Astronaut, Guitar Hero, and Coin-Operated Boy off Amazon. I loved the videos of her songs I saw on youtube, and without those, I very likely would never have heard of her.
And this is the thing that some labels don’t seem to grasp. The videos people watch on YouTube are like little commercials for the artists. They catch people’s attention and encourage them to check out the music. A lot of the bigger labels will allow videos on YouTube, but only on their own official channels and with embedding disabled, so that they can get ad revenue from people going to YouTube to watch the videos.
They are completely missing the point. The goal shouldn’t be to make money off of showing the videos (which is what led Warner to pull their videos in the first place, because they weren’t making enough), but to encourage fans to showcase the videos all over the place, in order to get new fans.
This method is working pretty well for a lot of independent artists and labels out there, but they aren’t operating on the same economic scale as the major labels, I suppose.
Dumbasses. This is how I buy music–I go to youtube so I can check out the whole song, not just a 30-second snippet from Itunes or Amazon.com. Then I buy. If I can’t listen to it, I’m not gonna buy it. Would I buy a painting if the gallery owner wouldn’t let me look at it first?
I’ve also started using Youtube as a way to hear bands that I’ve heard about, before hopefully buying their records (recent examples include the Residents and Duffy). Has the record company forgotten why they made video clips in the first place - to promote their artists?
years ago there was a thread about pirating music, me and one of the mods got into it fairly hard over the legitimate uses of pirating. His stance was its illegal and thus wrong, Mine was that its the only way I can check out 90% of the artists I listen to without just buying an album. I would dl listen, and if I liked it go pick up a copy.
now its youtube
and now its not youtube (well if you are a poor basterd on warner anyway)
you have got to love record labels, I wonder how long it will be before they are asking for a federal bail out?
The major labels are fucked - they’re on their way out, and they know it, so they’re trying to squeeze every last penny from every available source before the inevitable collapse. And they’ve found ways of screwing artists for decades, so this is really nothing new, just done with new media. The industry’s just slightly more respectable than the mob.
This is ironic, in that just about any classic WB Looney Tunes cartoon can be found on Youtube, as (guessing) WB has taken a laissez-faire hands-off approach to such, despite the possibility that it may cut into the profits of their Golden Collections.
Here’s what the artists should do:
Make a dummy account with no videos.
Make separate accounts for every video.
Subscribe/favorite other video accounts.
So tedious to wipe they usually don’t bother.
I know someone (the 5 second movie guy) who did this, worked well for a long while until the youtube intern got bored one day and stepped up to systematically delete them all… then he got his own site (Though to be fair, his work should have been protected under Satire/Parody, the artists are in a stickier situation with posting the complete work now owned by the label).
I guess the only thing left to say is: lame.
(I don’t know who this artist is but now I want to…)
I am a huge fan of Amanda Palmer, but I never would have heard of her if it wasn’t the video for Leeds United. And I would never have seen that video without youtube. After seeing the videos, and watching a few others, I bought the WKAP album. Warner is idiots, if they think that this move will help them in any way. Why are most of the major record labels willing to cut off their dick to spite their balls? They still get caught paying radio stations to play their music, but when people give them much more effective advertising for free, O NOES! Fuck them!
What fans of copyright laws as currently constituted in the US don’t understand (or more likely don’t WANT to understand) is that the copyright laws aren’t there for the artists, they’re there for the major record labels/publishers/movie megacorps that have the lawyers, the lobbyists and the $$$money$$$ to get them written the way they want them written. This is just another instance of of a small time/indie artists being fucked over by the big corps on behalf of the cash cows on their labels.
I think they know they’re going down, and they’re not about to admit it yet. So they want to go down fighting - fighting the little people, o hollow irony.
The thing is that they don’t HAVE to go down! All they have to do is embrace the new technology. It’s really their only hope to remain relevant in an era when the artist can go direct to the people without needing the recording companies to advertise and record for them. A home studio costs in the low thousands today and can be ordered from Roland and others for the cost of a click on the internet, compared to yesteryear when the technology was incredibly costly and hard to get for the average garage band. Distribution through a website is incredibly inexpensive, even when calculating bandwidth usage. Advertising is, basically, free, once the production costs of shooting a video are taken care of. YouTube costs nothing to post to.
The long-winded point being that if they don’t want to be completely obsolete and bankrupt within 20 years, they need to start getting with the program.
That would involve ‘work’. They’ve spent decades sitting on their cocaine bloated asses waiting for talent to roll across their field of view, and supporting only the technology that means more direct sales (i.e. the transition from LP to CD) and now getting up doing something means they have to leave their cozy, warm executive chairs with the automatic coke snorters. Its much easier to just keep griping, complaining, and hoping some magical court or law enforcement technique will turn back the clock for them.