YouTube to block indie labels who don't sign up to new music service

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/17/youtube-indie-labels-music-subscription

by uptown • 12 years ago

213 109 12 years ago

Will somebody here please make a video hosting website to replace YouTube.

jsonson• 12 years ago

What you are reading (and reacting to) here is part of the negotiation tactic of one party trying to force a better deal out of the other.

Accounting to the cited FT article, the issue isn't about the yet to be announced music service, rather that these "indie labels" are trying extract higher rates for the free streaming that is already available.

lukasm• 12 years ago

Absolutely, but I would be great to see some more competition in this space.

falcolas4• 12 years ago

Regardless of why this is becoming public, we would still only benefit from a YouTube competitor.

tehwebguy2• 12 years ago

Really, where? I didn't see that in the FT article at all.

tibbon• 12 years ago

Vimeo's there, but its even more curated/niche. I've always liked it more, but it hasn't had the same massive growth/traction (and to a degree I think they want it to stay that way).

Year ago many people tried to make other sites (Viddler, Blip, etc) but most/all of those folded for various reasons. I do wonder if someone today could do better...

Nickoladze• 12 years ago

Isn't Vimeo intended for just original content? All the video game "Let's Play"s and such can't be moved over.

k-mcgrady3• 12 years ago

I've considered moving everything to Vimeo before. The problem is that YouTube has vitality built in. If you don't have an audience you need YouTube.

charonn0• 12 years ago

Is Youtube actually profitable?

bsder• 12 years ago

Probably not without all the subsidy that YouTube gets via Google's scale of internet bandwidth and integration of ads.

I suspect that's why sites like Nico Nico (http://www.nicovideo.jp/) try to overlay as much to YouTube as possible.

dublinben5• 12 years ago

Host your own videos with MediaGoblin[0], and this will never be an issue again. Don't rely on for-profit companies to provide you with a free service.

http://mediagoblin.org/

zanny2• 12 years ago

I've always wanted to try a media content site (obviously based on open standards) where to avoid the whole DMCA mess you'd require all content to be relicensed under a CC license (of your choice).

That means if you don't own licensing rights, which is very obvious if you even include third party material, you can't upload it.

That means personal video is entirely safe, and anything you personally record is always safe, but you never get into the fair use mess that made youtube, vimeo, etc so bad in the first place.

I'd think such a project would work best if you were trying to promote original works, though - and serving video is not really that complex - the infrastructure around it is applicable to almost all media anyway. But that is some serious scope creep, but as someone who consumes most forms of digital media from freelancers and amateur content producers, it has to be incredibly annoying as someone who uses multiple services to have their art on deviantart, their music on soundcloud and bandcamp, their videos on youtube, their blog on tumblr, and their web games on newgrounds or armor games.

One major roadblock in content hosting, as the founder of imgur has came foward about on many occasions, is the raw size of the content database, plus the bandwidth costs. I think popcorntime has soundly demonstrated the capabilities of the torrent protocol to handle real time streaming - the startup time has significant overhead, but given sufficient health in the network can stream effectively. I'd definitely look into distributing any larger videos, audio, games, and photo galleries via torrents since they would all be CC licensed. Of course then you aren't talking about a website anymore since you can't integrate functionality like that in the browser, so it is kind of a tangential idea, but I primarily develop in Qt and think it would be a real realistic cross platform deployable application on every platform if wanted to go the app route. I could see there still being a website.

And then you get into monetization, which was youtubes problem. I think patreon and kickstarter are soundly proving that patronage is a perfectly viable business model. I find it baffling that the only service I know that does patronage or subscriptions is Twitch, but even that is just a very cut and dry $5 a month.

I guess in part that is because all the payment mechanisms out there are antiquated pains in the ass. And for a startup to try to integrate payments like that would be a huge legal mess. I'd rather just give users blockchain.io wallets and let them put money in on their own, like bitcointip or dogecointip do on reddit - that model has proven hugely successful. And as cryptocurrencies enter the mainstream, I think that kind of business would be prime to explode.

Instead of fixed payments, it would be integrated in all the content pages with every feasible way to pay - buying swag, patreon style per content gifts, kickstarter esque projects where you propose a project and get it funded preemptively, monthly subscriptions like Twitch, and one time quick donations. I would imagine users might want to still monetize via adds, but I would rather such a service be funded through, say, 5% of all patronage transactions than through ad networks, because that makes you beholden to their demands for how to run your service. It gives you immediate monetization metrics so as long as you can get some audience and if people actually funded the artists it would probably be profitable quickly.

But hey, that is just me. All my colleagues and mailing lists think I'm crazy. I keep throwing it around and if I ever met a few folks interested in trying it I'd definitely be up for giving it a major go - I think its the inevitable "maximal" solution to intellectual content.

Wow, that was quite the rant. Sorry HN.

magicalist3• 12 years ago

It would be great for videos to default to a permissive license, but I don't see how that would change anything fundamentally with regard to copyright problems.

You'd still have to deal with people uploading whatever they want, and so you'd still have to deal with DMCA takedowns, and you'd still have to deal with the vast gray area of fair use (remixes, snippets of songs playing in the background, parody and comedy, etc).

walterbell5• 12 years ago

I keep throwing it around and if I ever met a few folks interested in trying it I'd definitely be up for giving it a major go - I think its the inevitable "maximal" solution to intellectual content.

I've looked at business models for all-open content with strong attribution. One question is, how do you protect the business from free-riding competitors who are better capitalized and want to "enclose the public commons"? There have been a few promising efforts in crowdfunding of creative activity, where the resulting content was owned by the creators, e.g.

- (YC) Beacon for journalism

- Star Citizen game ($40M+ raised to date, for 1 game)

- Minecraft did well in selling alpha software

These models seem to work best when there is a strong community invested in using the creative work, and interested in funding roadmaps. Payment infrastructure for DIY crowdfunding continues to improve: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2013/09/your-guide-to-diy-crow... . PayPal's API can split a payment between several parties, e.g. 5% to patronage platform.

When DRM gets implemented in the browser (starting with video, but will inevitably be extended to ePub3 ebooks and thus any web page), public awareness will skyrocket with "no-can-do" messages that users will experience several times a day. Google can pull the rug out from Firefox whenever they want, making Chrome (and app store policies) as much a point of influence as Google Panda.

The low-cost way to get started is not to host content, but to create a decentralized directory based on crowd-sourced metadata (itself public domain) for public domain content. Start off by collecting the Top 500 most-viewed public domain items from: Youtube, Soundcloud, Universities, Internet Archive, Libraries/Museums. If that gets traction as a proof of concept, it can be scaled up.

In the short term, Qt (have you seen QtBitcoinTrader?) and luajit could form the base of a modern version of Groove/Chandler that runs on Mac/Linux/Windows. Medium term could incorporate concepts from secushare (p2p), camlistore (CCNx), askemos (trust) and tinc vpn.

In the long term, this needs to become a new operating system, borrowing concepts from Rebol, Plan9, Ethos OS, Genode, Qubes OS, etc. Then it can run on dedicated in-home hardware with virtualization and always-on connectvity to trusted peers and mobile devices. But that pipe dream requires success from earlier, simpler to deploy products :) Ping me if you want to brainstorm.

tehwebguy2• 12 years ago

This is super weird, I'm under the impression that music generates much higher ad rates than most content on YouTube. Wouldn't eliminating ads be sort of shooting themselves in the foot, even against a subscription fee?

Maybe they see the other streaming services replacing them in the near future.

davehur5• 12 years ago

These videos aren't being blocked, it's just that youtube will no longer have the license to show them, because those indie labels are holding for a better deal.

codezero3• 12 years ago

If I visit the URL of one of these videos, will it play?

It sounds like you are just arguing semantics about what "block" means internally at YouTube versus what a person using YouTube considers the word to mean.

mcintyre1994• 12 years ago

Just a theory but could music on YouTube have lower engagement with ads than other video? It seems much more likely to be backgrounded than other videos.

k-mcgrady3• 12 years ago

Every time I read about this I still can't believe Google is creating this service. Why do they need to create two of everything? They have Android and Chrome OS. Their was Wave, Buzz, Google Plus. I have separate Google Plus tied to my personal and business accounts and there is no way to resolve it. Now they have Google Play Music, Google Play Music downloads, and they're creating a new separate YouTube streaming service for music.

pjc50• 12 years ago

It's not so much about having two of anything as eliminating non-Google space.

JackpotDen• 12 years ago

Maybe they're the deadly duplicator.

k-mcgrady3• 12 years ago

> "WIN claims that the company has signed lucrative licensing deals with major labels Universal, Warner and Sony, while demanding that independent labels sign up to inferior terms or face having their videos blocked from YouTube's free service."

I hope this isn't true but it wouldn't surprise me. Creators of services that allow music to be accessed for free/very cheap always talk about how it's great for independents while simultaneously offering the majors better deals and screwing over the little guy.

davehur5• 12 years ago

It isn't. The videos aren't being "blocked", youtube simply won't have the license to show them anymore. These "indie labels" are trying to extract higher rates from free streaming by holding out on the paid service.

The real issue here is the guardian publishing the labels' PR as is.

falcolas4• 12 years ago

The statement "youtube simply won't have the license to show them anymore" reads drastically different from "His confirmation that YouTube will block videos from labels that do not sign licensing deals for the new premium tier"

What is your source for the first - i.e. where are artists revoking YouTube's license to display their videos?

hullo3• 12 years ago

From a seemingly more evenly sourced article on gizmodo:

"Some labels are refusing to sign up because they say they're getting a raw deal from Google. They say that while the major labels have negotiated lucrative contracts, Google is offering indies comparatively bad terms. It's their right to say they don't want to sign up if they don't like the deal Google is offering them. In response, Google is drawing a line in the sand: If your label won't sign on to Google's crappy licensing deal for a new streaming service, you can't host videos on YouTube at all."

http://gizmodo.com/googles-about-to-ruin-youtube-by-forcing-...

Google has a reply appended at the end that is absolutely the worst bit of corporate puffery-non-response I've ever seen from them and IMO as bad a sign as any of the actual things they're being accused of plotting.

geden• 12 years ago

The indies just want the same deal as the majors get. Fair and simple.

JonnieCache• 12 years ago

So basically they're chopping off the long tail? Seems bizarre to me.

Google really is the new MS.

Twitter should buy soundcloud and add music video hosting to it. Premium users only obviously.

danudey• 12 years ago

The long tail might be lucrative but there's more overhead, and mainstream(ish) music provides economies of scale.

Put another way: if they can make a penny per view on Psy's Gangnam Style video that's $20m for hosting and distributing one video. Maybe they can get 2 billion combined downloads from indie videos, but that requires hosting and distributing hundreds of thousands of videos. It makes sense, business-wise, to want more favourable terms from indie labels just because their content doesn't monetize as well, doesn't draw advertisers as well, and isn't viewed as much.

Floegipoky• 12 years ago

This is assuming that the long tail is independent (no pun intended), but it isn't.

Musical taste is a very complex issue, and lots of people are going to be annoyed that a handful of their favorite bands aren't on youtube anymore. Others are going to be really angry that their entire favorite genre is missing. Are enough people going to pissed off enough for it to hurt their bottom line? My guess is yes, especially after the heavy-handed tactics they've been using to try to force adoption of some of their other services that nobody wants.

The bigger problem is that it damages YouTube's brand. It's not just a video hosting site, it's THE video hosting site. It has everything- cute cats, stupid people eating cinnamon, your favorite music, etc. They're going to have real problems when the average user has to go elsewhere to see a video that she cares about, especially if that elsewhere also has cat videos and doesn't require a Google+ account to comment. Supporting the long tail is the cost of maintaining their monopoly.

guard-of-terra• 12 years ago

Psy's Gangnam Style is The Long Tail.

If YouTube was long tail averse, we'll never have Psy. All we'll have is all kinds of Lady Gaga. Never grossing near one billion.

askura• 12 years ago

This is VERY bad news for Indies that are seeing a lot of success through videos that go viral.

wutbrodo• 12 years ago

Well, not really. It's depressing that HN is being so credulous about this, but saying that Youtube is "blocking" or "removing" videos from indie labels that don't agree to the licensing fees is as accurate (or more) as saying that indie labels are blocking their videos from Youtube unless they give in to their demands for higher license fees. There's an ongoing negotiation over the license fees, and if indies decide that the value of having their videos up is high enough that it's worth it under the current license fees, there's nothing stopping them from accepting it.

To put it another way, if it's "VERY bad news" for them then they wouldn't let the negotiations get to the point where they pull their videos from Youtube.

waterlesscloud• 12 years ago

It's much worse news for YouTube. This is a deadly decision on their part.

sheltgor• 12 years ago

This could seriously open up the market for a new contender. Didn't Twitch take off thanks to how onerous it has become to handle game-related videos on Youtube? Perhaps something similar could happen for music, since as far as I know youtube is a HUGE source of exposure for independent artists and labels.

chris_mahan• 12 years ago

YouTube is becoming OurTV.

newaccountfool2• 12 years ago

YouTube is about to begin testing the new service – which will charge people to watch and listen to music without ads, and download songs to their mobile devices – within the next few days, initially within Google.

So, Adblock Plus and Youtube to MP3?...

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Annnnd...now we know why Chrome 35 doesn't even allow you to install 3rd party extensions in Developer Mode anymore, and they all need to be installed from the web store.

They might leave the blocker if it comes from the well known ones like Adblock or Adblock Plus, but they will reject any other extension that is purposefully built to block such ads in the new service.

briandh• 12 years ago

No, the reason you can't install extensions from third-party sources is to stave off crapware and worse from being installed by other programs, which is a real problem.

And it is only applicable on Windows, and not applicable to developer or enterprise channels.

EGreg5• 12 years ago

Another symptom of centralization. Why don't people host their own videos?

smacktoward• 12 years ago

Because doing so is complicated and expensive, would be my guess.

dave5104• 12 years ago

I also don't think grandma (or heck, even teenagers) are going to set up and configure their own servers to host videos.

dublinben5• 12 years ago

Because they're greedy and care more about having access to the enormous YouTube audience than being in control of their fan relationship.

EGreg5• 12 years ago

But what if there was a decentralized social network that allowed people to visit their site and immediately get a personalized experience as if they were logged in across this decentralized network? Why would people need to HOST their stuff on the centralized servers?

Shooti2• 12 years ago

Plausible breakdown of Google/YT's side of the story:

1. Youtube wants to offer users a subscription service with no ads.

2. Youtube needs to update its licensing/terms with artists: If a video plays for a subscriber they see no ads, artist gets money from subscription pool. If a video plays for a non-subscriber they see ads, artist gets money from ads pool.

3. Artists need to explicitly agree to these terms because it changes how and how much they'll get paid.

4. It doesn't seem fair for a user to pay a subscription, expect to see no ads, and then see ads for some video's because that artist/distributor did not agree to new terms. This is why Google wants all or nothing.

dublinben5• 12 years ago

YouTube's new service will be an audio streaming service, not a video streaming service though. I'm not sure why they think they can just make a slight modification to their licensing agreements and roll their video catalog into a music catalog.

The record labels are completely right to be demanding better terms here, just like they would get from Apple, Spotify, Pandora, etc.

fpgeek5• 12 years ago

How does that make any sense? The only YouTube subscription worth paying for is one that gets you out of YouTube ads (and, ideally, unlocks videos that are currently desktop-only on mobile devices, TVs, etc.). Perhaps they'd throw in audio streaming as a sweetener, but if videos aren't deeply involved they might as well just give Google Play Music All Access the needed rebranding, not re-negotiate anything and call it a day.

Shooti2• 12 years ago

Not sure you can draw such a hard line between audio/video since all the rumors point to this subscription service essentially being both:

http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/11/27/apk-teardown-youtube...

i.e. By enabling the Android/iOS Youtube app to background (which they've gone out of their way to disable up until this point), it essentially becomes an audio streaming service with the same interface.

Plus according to the FT, the problem the indie labels have isn't with the subscription rate per se, its how the new ad tier is set up:

"One label boss said the big problem with YouTube’s new licensing agreement was not to do with the paid tier, but rather that it allowed YouTube to make substantial enhancements to its free tier. His fear is that YouTube’s free tier will become so attractive that it will reduce the number of people willing to pay for subscription services such as Spotify or Deezer."

hullo3• 12 years ago

Taking all that at face value it certainly disregards the actual user, who in the vast majority of cases will not be subscribing to this new service. It sounds like Google+ all over again; where Google is spiting the vast majority of its users (removing content that they wish to see) in order to launch a (likely to fail) service that directly replicates one or more services already widely available.

spacemanmatt2• 12 years ago

No, it doesn't affect the non-subscribing users. They will see ads either way. It is the artists and the subscribers who would be adversely affected by artists that do not participate.

ryanwhitney• 12 years ago

> "It doesn't seem fair for a user to pay a subscription, expect to see no ads, and then see ads for some video's because that artist/distributor did not agree to new terms."

Why not? Make it clear on signup that it's a premium service with guaranteed quality content, and x number of major labels are on board where you won't be seeing ads.

If there's actual value to users (and artists--their brands won't be associated with random ads) in something like this, there should be enough pressure to encourage these indie labels to agree to terms and go ad-free, no?

IanCal3• 12 years ago

"Fewer adverts" doesn't quite have quite the same draw as "No adverts!".

fpgeek5• 12 years ago

Upon reflection , I think this article (and others like it) are starting from the wrong place and end up confusing the issue more than illuminating it.

I think the right place to start is that Google wants to offer a premium, ad-free YouTube service. Given that, what happens to videos that are ad-supported today:

1. They participate and are ad-supported for free users and subscription-supported for premium users. Cool. Everyone's happy.

2. They don't participate and...

(a) Premium users see ads anyway. They're pissed.

(b) Premium users don't see those videos at all, but free users see them with ads. Might dodge the issue for a while, but when they find out they'd be even more pissed.

(c) You can't offer ad-supported videos to free users unless you also offer ad-free videos to subscription users. Labels that like the ad-supported terms and don't like the subscription terms are pissed.

Alternative (c) seems to be what Google has picked. Which seems logical if they're launching a new service they want new users to like.

Corollary: Indie labels should still be allowed to post whatever non-monetized videos they want (subject to other YouTube policies like the terrible ContentId, of course). If that isn't true, then we can talk about being "kicked off YouTube". Otherwise, they're choosing to leave because they don't like how the monetization option is changing. That's clearly their privilege, but, in the exact same way, it's Google's privilege to change the monetization they're willing to offer (whether that's as small as tweaking the payout formula or something larger like adding a subscription tier).

P.S. I found some of the Ars Technica comments (not the article) particularly helpful in terms of explaining how this must fit together: http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/06/artists-who-dont-sig...

magicalist3• 12 years ago

One interesting thing is that this is a service that Google is letting you pay for instead of viewing ads. Have they done that before? I guess gmail/google apps, but that's a little different, as you have to get a new account, you can't add a subscription to your existing account. I wish they would do this for all of youtube, not just music.

The phrasing (and its effect on how people react to the story) is very interesting. If it had gone instead with "Google forcing labels to allow ad-free youtube subscription service" or something, you'd probably see far more positive reactions. I hate services like hulu plus (subscription and ads!) with a fiery passion, so it sounds good to me.

On the other hand, youtube is so ubiquitous, "block" might not be that poor of a choice of words, as not being able to monetize on youtube is surely a hit. Of course, if they're getting revenue from ads they already have some kind of deal, this is just a different one, and it wasn't so long ago that some labels were holding out ("blocking" youtube from playing their music) in a reverse of the situation.

Really, though, without knowing the details of how google is trying to strongarm them into this agreement (or even the terms of the agreement), it's hard to make much of a judgement here. Definitely played up in the news for drama, though.

fpgeek5• 12 years ago

Have they done that before?

As you note, not really, but YouTube is an excellent place to start. YouTube ads suck on pretty much every dimension compared to search/Gmail ads: They're irrelevant, repetitive, interrupt what you're doing, burn bandwidth, etc. And, so far as I can tell, there's no obvious way to make them less sucky for users without destroying the value proposition for advertisers.

I wish they would do this for all of youtube, not just music.

Given how often otherwise non-commercial videos end up monetized because of the music they contain, getting rid of music ads may affect more of YouTube than you might expect.

dspillett• 12 years ago

I wish they would do this for all of youtube, not just music.

As someone who visits youtube a fair bit but very rarely for music, I agree with you there. I can't see that they won't though: if the music side works out then it would make sense to push the idea more generally.

It won't be easy though: there will be many that don't want to sign up to a revised advertising/funding agreement. But the way I see it they are fighting the same fight many admonish the big media players for: they'll be trying to maintain the status quo instead of moving with the times, effectively trying to hold everyone else back because they don't see the need to move as it might not work in their favour.

peroo2• 12 years ago

The ability to monetize music on Youtube is unlikely to be a big hit since few labels make much compared to real streaming services. The big hit is going to be for promotion. The only reason indie labels have put up with the abysmal payouts from Youtube have been the fact that it's a great way to promote their music. Youtube is great for discovery and poor for streaming, which makes for great conversion.

However, what Google are trying to do is essentially turn Youtube into a fully fledged music streaming service, but they're framing it as the same old video sharing service to justify continued abyssmal payouts. They can do this because they know that artists will put pressure on their labels to get back on Youtube if they're ever blocked. It's a classic monopolist move, and the only solace is that Google will likely fuck up yet again like they do every time they try to enter different markets.

rwmj• 12 years ago

The premium ad-free service is already here: youtube-dl.

JetSpiegel2• 12 years ago

It even works on Linux with no hitches. And with Hardware Acceleration to boot.

notatoad2• 12 years ago

Youtube blocks all videos they don't have the rights to. If an indie label refuses to give google the rights to show their videos, then youtube can't play those videos. That isn't youtube blocking indie labels, it's indie labels refusing to licence their music to youtube.

bowlofpetunias• 12 years ago

If read it four times, but the logic in this statement is bizarre.

Your first sentence clearly states "Youtube blocks all videos they don't have the rights to". That's YouTube doing the blocking. Period. Of course they can play those videos, copyright hasn't gotten that far out of hand yet.

notatoad2• 12 years ago

Youtube is doing the actual act of implementing the block, but the only reason youtube blocks anything is because the content owner requested it to be blocked. They play/allow everything they have the rights to. Google is not telling the indie labels "fuck you, you can't have your music on youtube", the labels are revoking youtube's licence to broadcast their works because they don't like the way youtube is planning to broadcast it.

NAFV_P• 12 years ago

Second paragraph in the article > YouTube is about to begin testing the new service – which will charge people to watch and listen to music without ads, and download songs to their mobile devices – within the next few days, initially within Google.

Make a note of the wording: "watch and listen", as opposed to "listen and watch".

bakhy• 12 years ago

lucky thing that most YouTube music videos are blocked in Germany. i won't feel a thing.

otherwise, this looks an awful lot like another forced bundling by Google, like the way they're showing Google+ down everyone's throats. (I recently caved to that one, and reopened my Google+ simply to be able to login to sites where I was using my google login for authentication. they chose to take away that ability if you don't use G+, along with the ability to use the mobile hangout app, just because they can. i should move elsewhere.) now they're capitalizing on the market share of YouTube to coerce small labels, while large labels were reportedly given preferential treatment. but the fact that they will abuse YouTube instead of simply opening a new, independent service, and trying to win over customers to it, instead of forcing them over, that part stings me.

YouTube to block indie labels who don't sign up to new music service

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