Sony Music has just signed Taiwanese singer Lin Yu-chun. Lin was a part time shop worker who shot to fame via his rendition of the song “I Will Always Love You” — the Dolly Parton song made famous by Whitney Houston — became a sensation on video sharing website Youtube in April.
Lin who is only 24 years old will be joining the likes of Kelly Clarkson, Susan Boyle and Paul Potts, who all became famous by television shows and then signed to Sony Music after winning their respective shows.
You may have heard of Chatroulette, the internet’s favourite new way of showing your genitalia to strangers. Well, it’s not all anonynmous wang; this increasingly famous chap called Merton has been entertaining his video partners with improvised songs about them as they appear on their webcams:
His musical stylings were widely compared to a certain Mr. Benjamin Folds, who obviously got to hear about it, because Hypebot picked up the elaborate high-five he pulled by opening up Chatroulette during a live concert he was performing and copying Merton’s antics, making up the same sort of jolly little song.
Now, what I really want to see is a fully improvised version of Trapped In The Closet in this style, or possibly U2 doing the same thing at their next massive arena gig. Mind you, probably too much wang around to do it for an audience of 100,000 people.
Since Damon Albarn and Jamie ‘Tank Girl’ Hewlett’s collaborative cartoon band Gorillaz were nice enough to give YouTube an exclusive on the video for their new track ‘Stylo’, YouTube have let their fictional bassist Murdoc Niccols curate a post on their Celebrity Playlist section. The mask slips a little bit, and Murdoc’s voice betrays him as an excitable 40 year old man, rather than a sharp-toothed ego-bass-maniac. Some of the videos are nice, like the clip from Jacques Cousteau’s ‘Silent World’, and others are revealing, like the dressing room rehearsal of “Hip Hop”, by Mos Def and my favourite colliery band/rap mashup group, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble (who you should definitely check out on dino-space here). Anyway, here’s the clip – and no, Charlie Bit Me isn’t on there, odd, considering the teeth thing.
YouTube is obviously the go-to site for video, and possibly even music streaming. According to inside sources, their platform is now profitable (no link, sorry) in part due to their successful wrangling with the PRS and other rights organisations about music licensing fees. Now that Myspace is being forced into a pay-for-content model, it’ll be the only place where web users automatically go to find out more about a band they’ve heard of, and you, gentle reader, cannot afford to ignore it. If you haven’t shot a video for your latest track, cut some stills together, and for [insert deity here]‘s sake get it up online! Once you’ve done so, YouTube are dedicated to making it easy to generate views on your video:
YouScrobble is an interesting little offering that allows you to build playlists, watch video and download tracks, using the Last.FM and YouTube catalogues. I’m not wholly convinced that they asked permission to use these resources in the building of their site, but it does make for a convenient music search and discovery engine… Of course, there’s no reason you couldn’t flick between Last.FM and YouTube building playlists for yourself, but this is a quick and nice way of doing it in one place and of sharing it with friends and/or potential fans.
From their “about” page:
Enjoy YouScrobble and discover a new experience of searching, listening and downloading music of any kind and genre! Sign up for free and get to know all great features of YouScrobble.
Discover the biggest music library on the web.
Listen to and download your favourite music for free.
Get personal statistics of all listened and downloaded tracks.
Share your music favours with your family and friends.
Stay up to date with the latest changes and improvements.
Buy premium tracks and download faster and even if your daily download limit is reached! Check out the YouScrobble Premium membership soon.
Of course – that premium fee will be going to pay the licensing fees on the tracks that are listened to and downloaded, right YouScrobble?
YouTube is starting to really push into the live video streaming market, despite saying that it wasnt a viable market for a long time. The Google-owned video website has streamed the Outside Lands concert and an Obama press conference in recent months, but now it’s going to stream the Rose Bowl concert of one of the world’s most popular bands, U2.
The concert will begin at 8:30 PM PT on Sunday the 25th of October and it will be available in 16 countries. The live feed will be available on the U2 Official Channel, and feature a live Twitter feed of chatter about the concert.
The world’s largest video website, in a conference call earlier today, explained that it is seeking to experiment in live video. Clearly, YouTube sees some type of potential in this emerging market, as live video players Ustream, Justin.tv, and Livestream have started to prove the viability of this market.
Previously here at RouteNote we have been pretty critical of the PRS and how they go about their business. However, today the PRS and YouTube have finally announced that they have come to an agreement on licensing.
Google has confirmed that the new deal is a lump sum just like the last one, thus paying an upfront amount but not a per stream minimum. It is about time that the PRS be a little more flexible on their approach to licensing, but I still wonder if Google had access to work out which artists are PRS registered and then based the lump sum around that. Songwriters and composers will be keen to hear the finer details of the deal though, in terms of what tracking will be used to equitably share out the cash.
The deal is backdated to 9th January when the previous deal expired, and runs until June 2012. Neither Google nor PRS for Music is saying how much the upfront payment is, naturally.
YouTube’s director of video partnerships Patrick Walker says that “We are dedicated to establishing and fostering relationships that make YouTube a place where existing fans and new audiences can discover their favourite content – whatever it might be. We are extremely pleased to have reached an agreement with PRS for Music and look forward to the return of premium music videos to YouTube in the UK where they will join a variety of other content to be enjoyed by our British users.”
The Pirate Bay has been in the news a lot lately not always for good reasons. Anyways a Pirate bay fan has now written them a theme song. I have embedded it below, so let us know what you think.
In what may prove a revolutionary move, YouTube is refusing to pay the increased licensing fee that the MCPS/PRS alliance has demanded for the right to stream music videos for signed artists in the UK.
Music licensing can be a knotty problem; while most of the copyrights necessary to permit streaming for tracks belong to the record labels that have direct agreements with YouTube, there are other authorship rights that artists and songwriters can retain, or assign to be protected by the MCPS/PRS, which will attempt to collect revenues on their behalf whenever a song is played.
The previous licence that YouTube had negotiated with the PRS has expired, and the asking price for a new one is larger by many multiples. On top of this, the PRS has declined to specify what rights and what songs are actually covered by the agreement they’re offering to sell YT. In effect the PRS is demanding to be paid for a mystery box, which may or may not contain anything that YouTube actually needs.
The PRS have a different take on this, of course. They claim to be outraged on behalf of both artists and consumers that Google/YouTube have taken the drastic step of shutting down official access to music videos in the UK. Personally I find this quite unbelievable, since all they would need to do to permit the consumers to see these videos is set out exactly what rights they’re selling, and agree a reasonable price, rather than pulling a number out of the air, for an undisclosed package of rights and expecting it to be paid without question.
As we ponder all this, let’s think back to Jan 2008, when the MCPS/PRS forced Pandora, an online radio site that is nothing to do with Microsoft, to shut down UK operation. Pandora said they couldn’t operate sustainably if they had to pay the fees demanded of them. Do these sound like instances of the PRS looking after the rights of consumers and the artists they represent, or is it more like the stifling of new technologies and ways of consuming music, and why can’t the PRS specify what they’re actually bringing to the table in a deal this important?
What is sure is that while the content that’s being wrangled over is unavailable through more legitimate channels, the consumers will be looking elsewhere for their entertainment, to sites like the Pirate Bay to direct them to torrents that generate zero revenue for the artists concerned.
A lot of people are losing revenue and losing their jobs as the whole geography of the music industry, and the entertainment industry at large is gripped in the seismic change the internet is facilitating, and you can’t blame groups like the PRS and the big labels for trying to retain control. This said, perhaps stifling new channels like YouTube and Pandora is cutting off their nose to spite their face, and they would be better off supporting innovation, and creating new ways to generate revenue and help people enjoy the great music that their artists are creating.
CNET and the Wall Street Journal are both reporting that Universal Music Group and YouTube are in final negotiations to create a new music videos website, with the working title of Vevo.
The site is intended to feature music videos, artist-related content and interviews. The aim of course is to bring in more high profile brands who arent necessarily interested in advertising on YouTube because of its user-generated content.
It has been mentioned by CNET that the three other major labels have all been approached to join the Vevo service. Im sure this would all work in the same way as Myspace Music in which the major labels all have an equity stake. Myspace Music has amazed me that so many independent labels have come on board with the solution, because they should realise that part of their profits are still going to the major labels. However, with Myspace Music most independent labels need to have their music on the site, so why not make some revenues in the process.
