An exciting day for YouTube?
YouTube cuts three content deals
Instead of fighting against the growing cultural phenomenon known as YouTube, three more record labels, following Warner's lead, have moved toward promotion of their artists via hosting of copyrighted materials such as music videos on the popular video sharing site.
Today, Universal Music Group, Song BMG Entertainment, and CBS announced that artists' music and videos will be included in their original form on YouTube. Each has negotiated a different contract with different means of dealing with compensation. Sony utilizing streaming ad revenue while CBS has chosen to upload its own media content and either remove or put streaming ads next to unauthorized material that is up on the site now.
The most disturbing contract seems to be Universal's. It has been made clear yet if there will be a charge to see or listen to content from those artists. However, if that is the case, it will certainly be detrimental to Universal. If I can see other artists' videos for free with an ad, I'll always do that instead of dealing with the hassle of typing in my credit card number.
In fact, if they choose that path, I wouldn't be surprised if many of their artists will be very upset about it. With MTV playing maybe 5 videos a day, YouTube and other online video sharing websites have become the new means of finding out about new artists and their visual interpretations of their music.
In other news, Google has bought YouTube for the "low price" of 1.65 billion in Google stock. So it seems, the Google monster grows.
