if you hadn't noticed, all of the dresden dolls and amanda palmer official videos have been taken off youtube.
yes, folks...girl anachronism, coin-operated boy, shores of california, almost everything from who killed amanda palmer....pretty much the whole deal. all gone. go look for yourself. and you ask...wtf? this is why: nytimes, wired.
basically: "Unable to reach new licensing terms, the Warner Music Group has demanded that thousands of its videos be removed from YouTube, which is owned by Google. Warner Music's videos, the source of a billion views on YouTube, gradually began disappearing from the site on Saturday, although many remained online Sunday evening."
in other words, roadrunner is a subsidiary of warner and i'm stuck in hell with madonna and the other poor bastards, because warner wants more money. even worse, warner has almost no bargaining power...they're not even in the top ten of labels who have huge artists with material streaming on youtube. they're just starving for cash right now and they're doing anything they can think of to come up with cash. it's abSURD. they are looking for money in a totally backwards way.
money that, i should point out, i would NEVER see as an artist. if they got their way and youtube decided to give them a larger revenue share of the videos, it;s very unlikely it would ever make it's way into the artists' bank accounts.
damn, man. this shit is fucked UP.
You stay classy, Music Industry.
Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls says:
Tags: corporations, music
Current Music: Robots In Disguise -- We're in the Music Biz ♬
20 Responses:
If I ever lament not having a label, I need to be slapped.
It is really badass to be able to say to anyone, "sure, you can use my music for free for this project" and not have to ask permission from a single other soul.
Consider Magnatune as a label, then.
i have. if they offered the option to decline being licensed by objectionable companies, i would do it in an instant.
I'll forward that suggestion to John, the owner. Email me if you want to be in direct contact. His email isn't hard to guess, though.
Thank you so much! I think I've made this request before, via John Zorko (Falling You) but it doesn't hurt to ask again.
And frankly I probably should go ahead and do it anyway... I just hate it when bands complain that their music is being used for an ad, when they did nothing to prevent that use.
John replied to me. I wrote my own post about it:
http://giantlaser.livejournal.com/140851.html
i thought it was bad that UMG doesn't allow embedding! haha.
Wow, it's almost like record labels are a bunch of useless rent seeking anachronisms who cannot adapt their business plan to new technology or something.
Publishers have always offered artists a Faustian bargain: a little certain wealth and a huge probability of either utter neglect or getting screwed or both, unless luck out, in which case you get a little more wealth, a tiny fraction of what you raise, and screwed.
Back in the eighties the local branch of the music industry protection racket told TVNZ, then New Zealand's only TV broadcaster, that they'd have to start paying royalties. TVNZ told them they'd have to start paying advertising rates. They had a stand off for several months until whichever label Queen was on decided that they really needed to promote the soundtrack for Highlander and bought a whole advertising segment to play `It's a Kinda Magic'. Then sanity was restored.
I give them about a month to work out that they've just taken a hammer to the knees of their bottom line...
I was looking for an AP video just five minutes before I saw this post so at least now I know what everything's gone missing.
In the comments on Palmer's blog:
youtube DJs? Is that some sort of lower lifeform than the laptop-toting mp3-playing types?
Note to self, start bringing in gadges to jam wifi in bars and see if the music suddenly cuts off and the douchebag behind the macbook suddenly starts panicking.
Sometimes when I;m looking for music videos on YouTube, I'll see some people who collected a bunch of vids as a playlist for an entire album. I guess that's their way of getting music.
I guess here in the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY that's what the kids do instead of holding a cassette recorder up to the speaker on the teevee.
Some people make audio playlists for listening: Dresden Dolls, FTW
Welcome to Web 3.6.2
Won't somebody think of the children?
I actually bought a dresden dolls album after watching some of their videos on youtube. Most of the albums I buy come from exposure to the performer's material for free on t'internet.
It's daft.
I tested the theory posited at the end of NYTimes article that people would just go to MySpace or AOL to get videos. AOL scratched up 6 Amanda Palmer videos, a subset of what is available even on iTunes, and far less than was on youtube. Navigating AOL site is also like surfing through quicksand. Her MySpace now has no video, as well, because it embeds now defunct youtube videos.
As a citizen of a Comcast monopoly zone, I can safely say that Comcast has already so over hobbled YouTube bandwidth that I do my best to avoid watching anything on YouTube at this point. It's painful.
So, it's all good. Nobody wants you to see these videos or hear this music anyway. They want you to pay your bills, listen to their ads and then STFU.