Rick Rolled Out

[Requia ☣]

The song being on youtube does not in any way prevent him from selling it in other venues (like iTunes).  If this were a TV show on Google he might have a point, but its not, its a music video, the purpose of which is to *promote* the song.  Its a commercial, not a revenue source.

[MMIX]

The song being on youtube does not in any way prevent him from selling it in other venues (like iTunes).  If this were a TV show on Google he might have a point, but its not, its a music video, the purpose of which is to *promote* the song.  Its a commercial, not a revenue source.

The song being on youtube - which, despite its monumental losses, $1.6 Billion iirc, is supposed to be a commercial (i.e. revenue generating) operation, severely restricts the market for product which can now be freely accessed at no cost and thus provides no benefit for the artists/writers.

Personal observation: I no longer buy music but, back when I did, I almost always opted for the video version. I have to admit that partly this was because of a research interest in the creation/re-creation of contemporary icons but also because so much commercial musical product of the last thirty years always seemed to be lacking something when divorced from its visual elements. Very much a case of "Nice video - shame about the song . . ."  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM1c7YSizjU

[Requia ☣]

You cannot acquire the song from Youtube* you can watch the music video.  The song (the bit that can be played in a music player and so forth) still has to be bought elsewhere.

As for buying the music video, that's never been a big market.  Hell I couldn't even find music videos in the 90s.  They were created to be a form of advertisement.  MTV ad so forth do lose out, but nothing says they don't have to face competition.

*There's probably software that can get you the song, but you can also pirate it off any torrent site easier.

[MMIX]

You cannot acquire the song from Youtube* you can watch the music video.  The song (the bit that can be played in a music player and so forth) still has to be bought elsewhere.

Technically correct but this begs so many questions about what actually constitutes "the song". Is it "the dots" the actual music score - something else which can be bought and sold but the sound of paper is quite limited unless its a pianola roll . . .

As for buying the music video, that's never been a big market.  Hell I couldn't even find music videos in the 90s. 

Yeah , I suspect I'm pretty much in the minority there. Except that I still can't imagine Thriller without the full mini-movie with dance routines thing. Again, these things may have started as loss leaders/adverts but stuff like Thriller and Bohemian Rhapsody surely pushed them into a different gear and the commercial key is still how to equitably remunerate the 'producers', from the Talent to the technicians and even godhelpus the corporate entity which is funding the whole thing.

They were created to be a form of advertisement.  MTV ad so forth do lose out, but nothing says they don't have to face competition.

They developed beyond their origin in advertising because the technology developed to enable them to do so. And my argument is not about youtube being in competition with MTV it is about how in an increasingly complex technological environment you can still 'pay the piper' - and, for the purposes of this discussion,  the guy who wrote the song

*There's probably software that can get you the song, but you can also pirate it off any torrent site easier.

Interesting idea but on a practical level no use to me. I don't torrent, I don't know what an MP3 is I don't have an iPlayer, I never even had a walkman. Am I odd? - probably. Am I unique? - probably not. I lived through the whole of this technological development from being a kid in the 60's with a reel to reel taperecorder who used to tape Top of the Pops every week - you know, back in the day - when it was still live, back in The Stones Age. My parents hated that. I used to get extremely testy if they made a noise during the show because I was recording with a good old fashioned microphone. I wish I still had those tapes, sigh. So, now I come to think about it, I have a long and undistinguished history of music piracy. Back then I used to think that if I could afford it I would pay direct to the writers/performers, I think I pretty much still feel that way, its just that the technology has changed and the number of creatives involved in the process has increased.

[Placid Dingo]

Cramulus, if they are actually getting $149 / month then they are earning close to $1800 p.a. Waterman was paid $16 by google/youtube which is way less than 1% of that.  This was for the use of copyrighted material the creation of which is the basis of Waterman's employment and livelihood. I have huge problems with the  current state of IP "rights" and copyright law in general but I honestly think you are being unfair to Pete Waterman in this instance - hence my, apparently unsuccessful, attempt at irony with the punk collective image with the anti-copyright message and my "blind justice" hands over the eyes comment on my personal responsibility towards the copyright law.

We're not actually saying that lyric writing from many years ago is to be paid on par with present day heavy physical labor for foreign governments are we? Because that seems a little silly.

[MMIX]

Cramulus, if they are actually getting $149 / month then they are earning close to $1800 p.a. Waterman was paid $16 by google/youtube which is way less than 1% of that.  This was for the use of copyrighted material the creation of which is the basis of Waterman's employment and livelihood. I have huge problems with the  current state of IP "rights" and copyright law in general but I honestly think you are being unfair to Pete Waterman in this instance - hence my, apparently unsuccessful, attempt at irony with the punk collective image with the anti-copyright message and my "blind justice" hands over the eyes comment on my personal responsibility towards the copyright law.

We're not actually saying that lyric writing from many years ago is to be paid on par with present day heavy physical labor for foreign governments are we? Because that seems a little silly.

Silly??? Like paying sportsmen huge wages because they have time-limited careers . . . I mean working stiffs not mega stars - that's a different argument. Like recording companies and sheet music companies generating profits over centuries from the work of musicians and composers who are long dead . . ? The comparison was not of the nature of the work but of the pittance paid for a comparative years work. Waterman's point seemed to be 'Those foreign workers are being shafted and so am I'. NB many of those workers are Nepalese where the average wage is estimated at between $180 / $200 a YEAR . . . The thing which is SILLY is the whole idea of money and comparative wages in a world economy - but that, again, is a different argument

[Triple Zero]

*There's probably software that can get you the song, but you can also pirate it off any torrent site easier.

actually once you get the software in place it's easier than having to find a good torrent first, then putting it in the client, and you know what you're getting from youtube (immediate preview), but the soundquality of a youtube video is pretty bad (usually a 64kbps mp3).

in fact you don't even need software, just a website, such as kickyoutube.com, which allows you to do this:

have a youtube URL like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h6pcqC6wrI

and then you type "kick" like http://www.kickyoutube.com/watch?v=9h6pcqC6wrI

and then you can click a link and download wheeee

for those people who know how to run Python scripts, I personally find the youtube-dl script incredibly useful. it would, for instance, allow me to open that webpage with "30 punk songs" for LMNO, use Ctrl-L in Opera to copy/paste a list of all the youtube URLs to a textfile, and use that textfile to automatically one by one download all the songs, without much effort on my part.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

*There's probably software that can get you the song, but you can also pirate it off any torrent site easier.

actually once you get the software in place it's easier than having to find a good torrent first, then putting it in the client, and you know what you're getting from youtube (immediate preview), but the soundquality of a youtube video is pretty bad (usually a 64kbps mp3).

in fact you don't even need software, just a website, such as kickyoutube.com, which allows you to do this:

have a youtube URL like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h6pcqC6wrI

and then you type "kick" like http://www.kickyoutube.com/watch?v=9h6pcqC6wrI

and then you can click a link and download wheeee

for those people who know how to run Python scripts, I personally find the youtube-dl script incredibly useful. it would, for instance, allow me to open that webpage with "30 punk songs" for LMNO, use Ctrl-L in Opera to copy/paste a list of all the youtube URLs to a textfile, and use that textfile to automatically one by one download all the songs, without much effort on my part.

On *nix, the flash plugin caches flash videos as /tmp/Flash*. These are .flv files, which will play with any audio player for which I have tried them. With mplayer, you can tell it to spit out a .wav or simply not to show the video stream.

[Cramulus]

Cramulus, if they are actually getting $149 / month then they are earning close to $1800 p.a. Waterman was paid $16 by google/youtube which is way less than 1% of that.  This was for the use of copyrighted material the creation of which is the basis of Waterman's employment and livelihood. I have huge problems with the  current state of IP "rights" and copyright law in general but I honestly think you are being unfair to Pete Waterman in this instance - hence my, apparently unsuccessful, attempt at irony with the punk collective image with the anti-copyright message and my "blind justice" hands over the eyes comment on my personal responsibility towards the copyright law.

Yeah, but people telling each other about cool stuff isn't a commercial transaction and shouldn't have a price tag attached to it. It's sad that a lot of people in the music industry are getting the shaft, financially, but this is because they're trying to apply old business models to a new form of market. Media has changed since the 80s, you just straight up can't guard information that you're broadcasting everywhere. Especially 20 years after it peaked.

Imagine if, back in the 60s, everybody built their own radio station transmitters. It would be too big of a job for the FCC to monitor every single station. People are going to play their favorite music, and they're not going to pay any royalties. Does that mean somebody's getting screwed out of money? Why does the entire system have to accommodate the financial interests at the cost of the creative ones? Going back to Utilitarian Ethics, what's the greatest good for the greatest number? Is it restricting everybody's right to have a radio station? To me, it seems fairer to change the nature of IP. There's no real reason to expect cash just because your song is popular on youtube. Should the artist worry that people are not buying the album because they can hear the song on the radio whenever they want? Hell no - the song on the radio / internet is a commercial for the CD.  If you're not profiting off of your internet fame, it's because you're using a ten year old model.


When the printing press was invented, an awful lot of scribes lost their jobs.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I'm not sure if this represents a change, really. It's just the continuation of a trend -- information tends to travel faster between any two points as time goes on. That anyone had a radio station in the 60s was just as much an advance over the 1860s as youtube is over standard radio in the 60s -- since radio is not only wireless (meaning that receivers don't need to be telegraph operators), but contains more than just telegraph signals, just as a youtube video contains more than just audio and has many more potential producers and consumers than radio.

[Triple Zero]

On *nix, the flash plugin caches flash videos as /tmp/Flash*. These are .flv files, which will play with any audio player for which I have tried them. With mplayer, you can tell it to spit out a .wav or simply not to show the video stream.

True but you can feed youtube-dl the URL to any youtube movie, without even loading it in the browser, which is often more useful.

I usually use ffmpeg to rip the mp3 from the flv. Because an flv is just a multi stream format like AVI, all it has to do is separate the original mp3 stream embedded in the flv file, no need to re-encode anything even.

[MMIX]

The point I really want to tease out is the kind of grey area around exactly what, in an increasingly fluid market, constitutes a commercial transaction. You say that two people swapping ideas about music [or even books or magazines maybe???] does not qualify as a commercial transaction. I'm just interested in where the line between commercial/non-commercial lies when the material they are swapping can have a monetary value defined in legal rights held by someone else and which represents their livelihood. And for all the "freedom" of information and music and such in the contemporary social market even when the lines are blurring almost before the ink is dry the bottom line is . . .  if people are still making money out of "stuff" no matter what the market/legal model it seems to necessarily rely on some form of legal "ownership" and copyright. I'm actually pretty much in favour of kopyleft and the most non restrictive practice practicable in the dissemination of all IP materials but thats 'cos I'm still pretty idealistic for an ground down old hag

[Kai]

Oh lawd. Another good thread turned into a shitfest on some argumentative subject.

[MMIX]

Oh lawd. Another good thread turned into a shitfest on some argumentative subject.

WTF??

[Dr. Paes]

Mittens to OP.

Oh lawd. Another good thread turned into a shitfest on some argumentative subject.

Disagree. Mittens to discussion as well.