The people in control of the music business have always been threatened by new media. When the phonograph record originally emerged it was feared that it would kill off live music. In the early ‘80s the music industry campaigned against the cassette tapes, claiming that, “home taping is killing music.” Retrospectively, in both cases, quite the opposite proved true. The most recent example of this would take shape in the form of the internet, and more specifically one of it’s most visited mediums, YouTube. YouTube has become the third most visited website in the world behind Google and Facebook. Since its creation in February, 2005, YouTube saw rapid growth; sixteen months after its creation, 100 million clips were being viewed per day. YouTube users have developed a community in which technology has enabled new kinds of musical creativity. The internet and YouTube have now become technology that challenge the way we perceive music, musician and audience.
Teens evidently don’t see computers as technology. It’s as if they have developed an innate ability for text-messaging, iPodding, gaming, and multitasking on multiple platforms. They can share their life story on Facebook, entertain each other on YouTube, muse philosophically in the blogosphere, contribute to knowledge on Wikipedia, and create cutting-edge art on Flickr. (Hartley, 2009)
Lange (2008), an ethnographic researcher, discussed a number of misconceptions people have about YouTube. Lange noted that YouTube is more a social network site than a video-sharing site. This allows for a vast amount of user-generated content to be viewed and critiqued by an equally large amount of users. People in control of the music business have only just started to realize that one must understand how the internet works, and how to create with it. YouTube is a site that allows many people to not only consume, but also create. Within this, changes are occurring in promotion, distribution, the introduction of streaming music, and the presence of online music press. This digitization process puts the audience in control.
The fact is, if you want to make a difference in music, you have to change the machine. (Christie 1998)
The Internet has largely brought music back down to earth again. It has de-centralized the business and also put it back in the hands of the artists to a major degree, but not without consequences.
Ok Go, a band that has built it’s reputation to some degree on the popularity of it’s viral videos, most notably their famous ‘treadmill’ video for the single “Here It Goes Again” recently crossed hairs with their label, EMI. Their innovative and expensive video for “This Too Shall Pass” sparked a debate between the band and their record label. EMI had made an arrangement to share ad revenue from the traffic the video generated on YouTube but this did not include views on other websites where the video might be embedded. So, EMI carefully employed the tactic of banning viewers of embedding the video, in the hope that they would watch the video on YouTube instead. OK Go were unhappy about this and with a firmer understanding of how internet communities work, they knew that the promotion from a massively viral video was far more important than a small sum in advertising revenue. This resulted in the band splitting from their label. Damian Kulash from Ok Go believed that the lock-down version of “This Too Shall Pass” was hindering fans’ enjoyment of the video as well as any publicity the band might gain from sharing the video. Kulash released a public statement on the band’s site and wrote in The New York Times on the issue.
“When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000. Our last royalty statement from the label, which covered six months of streams, shows a whopping $27.77 credit to our account.”
This reinforces the effect of community on the success of content on YouTube. The ease of sharing content is one of the main attractions about the site, and when sharing content is disabled, it can cut off a huge potential audience. Ok Go intended for their video to go viral, without sharing this can simply not happen. Incidents like this also show that record labels are starting to realize that the power is now in the hands of the audience and the online community that resides in YouTube.
More than often, songs will appear in YouTube videos that have not been uploaded with the permission of label or artist. In February 2007, Stephanie Lenz posted a 29 second clip on YouTube of her son dancing to Prince’s song “Let’s Go Crazy”. Four months later, Universal Music Corp., who own the rights to the song, ordered YouTube to remove the video and almost 300 others involving Prince’s songs. Lenz then sued Universal, claiming the company had acted in bad faith by ordering removal of the video and that it was obviously fair use of the song with no intended commercial value. Universal denied her claim and argued that the law does not require copyright holders to decide if work is fair use before removing it.
In December 2011, Juliet Weybret recorded a video of herself playing the piano and singing “Winter Wonderland,” and posted the resulting video on YouTube. Soon later she learnt that YouTube had removed her video “as a result of a third-party notification by the Warner Music Group,” which owns the copyright to the Christmas carol. Countless YouTube artists have been caught up in a dispute between Warner Music and YouTube. The conflict circles around how much Warner should be paid for the use of its copyrighted content, its music videos, but has grown to include other material produced by YouTube users in the form of covers that may also break copyright law. A spokesman for Warner Music said that YouTube’s system for identifying copyrighted material (Content ID) does not distinguish between professionally made music videos and user created content that may include copyrighted works owned my Warner Music.
YouTube more recently began blocking music videos from all companies from its site in Britain after failing to reach terms with PRS for Music, a group that collects royalties on behalf of singers and songwriters. YouTube plays a huge importance in the income of an artist who is signed up to the PRS. Almost 14 million YouTube plays accounted for a whole 40 percent of the total transactions PRS processed between July and September 2008. YouTube also gets a share of affiliate revenue sent from official music videos to iTunes Store and Amazon. After a licensing deal was struck between YouTube and the PRS which reinstated the videos, Patrick Walker, YouTube's director of video partnerships said,
“The position of the record labels is inherently weaker because of the falling value of recorded music and that gives the other people in the equation, including artists, managers and producers, more power. What we are seeing here is those players flexing their muscles, which is only possible because the record labels are weakening."
More noticeably, however, the takedown notices are a wide example of the rising tensions between Internet sites that host free content and owners of copyrighted material.
In December 2009, Warner Music and YouTube failed to agree to terms on a new licensing deal that would have paid Warner a cut of advertising revenue in exchange for permission to stream the music company’s videos on the site. Soon after, Warner began having its videos removed from the site in quick succession.
The situation has raised new questions about the meaning of fair use under copyright law in the context of an internet community, when anyone can easily use copyrighted works and release the result in a manner that is sometimes hard to identify as being a commercial product or not. Others might argue that the videos, while themselves are being created for noncommercial reasons, are still being shown on sites such as YouTube, which is a moneymaking enterprise.
Some argue that because many individuals can now express themselves through mass media on the internet, that amateur content is becoming more apparent in new media. Andrew Keen expressed this in The Cult of the Amateur (2007),
“The entire music industry, which has brought us classic recordings of everyone from the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and the Clash to Luciano Pavarotti and Maria Callas, is being strangled”.
He also argues that the music on YouTube,
“eclipses even the blogs in the inanity and absurdity of it’s content.”
His statements imply that the music industry is a fundamental part of producing professional and worthy content. Without this in place he argues that “there is no way for a band to become the next supergroup”.
Many in the music industry are left bitter about the change in the way we listen and share music. Fewer people are buying CDs because there is so much music available online, legally and illegally unfortunately. Also fewer people are going out to live concerts because they can watch video clips of live performances on YouTube or other music sites. Others see YouTube as their chance at stardom and embrace the change.
“[YouTube] makes me try harder. It makes me want to write songs more. It makes me want to be a better musician. I want this to be my ticket to the real deal. It makes me want to try so hard (W. Johnston, May 2009).”
Other notable artists who have found fame through YouTube are Soulja Boy, and Justin Bieber who as of last year has the most viewed YouTube video in history with his single “Baby”. In early 2007, when he was twelve, Justin Bieber sang Ne-Yo's "So Sick" for a local singing competition. His performance was filmed by his mother and posted on YouTube.
"It had a hundred views, then a thousand views, then ten thousand views, so I just kept posting more videos and more videos. Eventually, I got found by my manager who flew me to Atlanta to meet Usher." (Justin Bieber, 2009)
Notably this was a major sign that labels and people in control within the music industry started to take YouTube seriously as a platform for artists to grow. When artists such as Justin Bieber acquire so many views from fans on YouTube, it changes the way the industry gauges the success of the artist, especially when the meaning of record sales is diminishing in favour of the viral video.
This was questioned when Lady Gaga reached one billion views on YouTube at the same time as selling 15 million albums to date.
"The notion of tracking sales and correlating that to success is a bit antiquated," says Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff. "There's no single indicator you can look at now--you must look at everything."
That means measuring not just physical record sales but digital album and single sales, and pulling data from a variety of non-traditional platforms such as YouTube and Spotify. The record industry must track downloads on iTunes and Amazon, fans on Facebook, followers and mentions on Twitter, views on Vevo, YouTube and more.
It can be argued that millions of views on a YouTube video may not equate to profit initially compared to the sale of records or downloads but the way in which in artist gains success now is through communities online.
"When you look at Lady Gaga hitting a billion views, I think that's a very positive wake-up call for the industry--that we need to think about the metrics of success differently. If you were to look at the numbers for Lady Gaga, the number of views she gets on YouTube versus downloads that she gets on iTunes, obviously, a single download on iTunes will pay her more than a single view on YouTube, but when you look at the traffic — the number of people that are coming back and watching her videos over and over again, watching her videos before they download the song, or discovering them on YouTube — you can see how that scale can compete with a paid service.”
The changes in new media are distinguished by accessibility and practicability of electronic communication. The internet is the latest form of this type of media, and continues to evolve as new applications are continually being created for it, and is constantly becoming more interactive.
Seven of the ten most popular videos of all time on YouTube are music videos, and another one "The Evolution of Dance" is music-oriented. YouTube is altogether a new form of communication that is very different to that of television or radio. Due to mainly user created content, it is not only a gateway into mainstream media, but also a place for self-expression, support and interaction. The evidence suggests that the music industry feels threatened by this change in media, but this does not need to be the case. Users of music do not see music as a form of property but more of an act of self-expression. The power of new media such as YouTube does not lie in potential to threaten the industry, but to make clear the possibilities of a platform that adapts to everybody’s desire for self-expression, and to change the way we perceive music forever.
Bibliography
Greg Kot: How the Internet Changed Music - TIME (2009)
A New Stage For Music: YouTube and the Amateur Musician – (2009)
R. Latham, C. Butzer: Legal Implications of User Generated Content: YouTube, MySpace, Facebook - (2007)
B. Hiatt: The Record Industry’s Decline - (2007)
A. Lastufka: YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts - (2008)
E. Qualman: Socialnomics, How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business – (2010)
