Do the musicians really own the songs? Or is it the music companies?
That said, the big music companies, or at least some of them, are fools. Most YouTube posters of music are fans trying to promote music they like. And much of the material is that which you are not going to generally find on the airwaves, in the CD racks @ Wal-Mart, etc. I’ve seen great stuff taken down, and then who knows it exists? Certainly not any potential new fans / customers.
Even if a tune is popular, YouTube postings can help promote it. Further, YouTube’s audio and video quality is quite limited. Posters should be encouraged to opine on why viewers should buy the CD or DVD, audio and video quality being a good reason; supporting the artist another.
I have inquiries on YouTube right now, asking if posted tunes / vids are available on CD / DVD, and am tracking such inquiries by others, too. In other cases I’ve encouraged viewers to “get that DVD” or posted “you should hear this CD on a good stereo system!” And I’m not even the poster.
Do some people make compilations of YouTube vids? Maybe so, but it’s probably a losing money / time proposition, unless either the material is not available elsewhere, OR they are mass copying and distributing it, which is another matter entirely. And, as I said, either way the quality stinks.
Not to mention the takedown rules were never abolished... almost all of these songs on You Tube don’t exactly hide, you can find them by searching from its home page. If it’s yours and you do not consent to it being there, you alert You Tube and poof it’s gone. This was not good enough?
I agree that it is stupid to go after your fan base like that. But people can legally do stupid things. I think it’s stupid for McDonalds to charge more money for 2 6-piece McNuggets than for 3 4-piece McNuggets, but they have every right to do so, and I don’t get to arbitrarily decide that I should only pay $1.50 for a 6-piece nugget.
I assume in many cases the music companies own the songs, because they have paid for the rights. If there is something immoral about how they get the rights to the songs, we should target that with legislation, but that’s a different issue. More artists are self-publishing these days, so they own their own songs.
Most songs cost 99 cents now, if you just want an MP3. I don’t know how much ITunes charges for WMA. On the other hand, even with the poorer-quality youtube video sound, there is a huge number of people using online tools to strip audio from youtube for their own collection. Sometimes the artist encourages this, other times it’s just taking something for free when it’s easy to buy it.
BTW, I understand the idea of downloading a song you want when there is no way to buy it anymore, because it’s out-of-print and nobody has ripped it. But if the song is on Amazon for 99 cents, you shouldn’t decide “I like that song, but I think 99 cents is too much to pay, so therefore I am justified in stealing it”.
My daughter, whom I’ve given enough lectures about this for her to understand the concept, was wondering what the problem was with SOPA, and why I didn’t support it given my disdain for people taking music for free. I explained that the biggest problem is it makes every content provided personally liable for what users do — like YouTube being able to be sued if a random video is posted and has a song in it that wasn’t properly sourced.
I think so long as a provider offers a way for content owners to get their property removed on request, we are good. I think that’s how things are today. I think some sort of new law is needed to protect from foreign theft, but SOPA as currently defined isn’t it.
BTW, It’s amazing how many MP3s are online now. I’ve been picking up MP3 albums from my college years, as part of my conversion of my old albums/tapes to MP3 so I can retire my oversized stereo system before it breaks for good. And sometimes I get entire albums for $4.99 (Amazon just had a sale) — I even bought a couple MP3 albums when I still had a perfectly good record, just because it was worth the $5 to not have to record each song on the album in my MP3 recorder and then enter the information for the file.