Warner Bros. vs. YouTube- how to make enemies and alienate your audience
AP named Hulu as the website of the year and while you could argue that there were plenty of other good contenders (Facebook, Twitter, Obama’s site), it makes sense to give ‘em the crown. For once, media congloms came together on their own and built a product that people actually flocked to online.
Sad to say, that lesson was lost on Warner Bros. who pulled their videos from YouTube. Ideally, they would have though ‘the last time we went to war with a hugely popular Net service and didn’t provide an alternative (Napster), we got killed so we gotta be smarter now.”
But, they didn’t do that. So when users go looking for Gnarls Barkley or Beck or Jenny Lewis or Kid Sister on YouTube, they’ll just get error messages and find the stuff someone else, probably not authorized by WB since they didn’t have an alternative in place to send users. And thus, these boneheads unwittingly empower other unauthorized online services to service up their goods. Pretty freakin’ stupid and yet another reason that nowadays, majors are only good at killing themselves off.
Comments
i have a little vid on youtube (about RC cars)and i put 30 seconds of “enter sandmann” from metallica.
My video was locked by toutube beacause Metallica is a warner band…..
I don’t agree with free downloading, because i think that artists have to get money with their work.
So I was used to buy their music, films and other stuffs. But now, i realy thinK that the major companies are just driven by completly stupid persons!!!!
To be on youtube, is just like a free commercial, for the artists,(and for majors in the same time)
A vid on youtube(or dailymotion etc.), can decide you to buy a concert ticket, a music album, or a DVD…
Now when I would like to buy some music, I ‘ll look to see if it’s a warner product. In that case ,I won’t buy it…..
Sorry for the warner artists, but may be they have to think about an other way to be produced.
SORRY FOR MY ENGLISH! (I’m french)
PS: Do someone know if there is an official site to complain about this stupid decision from the WARNER BROS?
Comment by sebouze59 from france — December 30, 2008 @ 2:58 am
They didn’t just yank their video’s. These idiots haven gone full blown reject. If you have a video on youtube, that happens to say have background music in it, playing Van Halen. That video will be blocked, due to copyright infringement. Wow, now that is messed up. So, as an example: Had a video of a biplane flying in an airshow, in which Van Halen’s song, Right Now, was playing over the loud speaker… ***Blocked, due to copyright infringement of music by Warner Bros.*** Real winners they are. No wonder they will not last any longer.
Comment by Drew from Illinois — January 3, 2009 @ 5:53 am
Yup, they blocked 2 of the 6 videos in my series cause they contained songs on affiliate labels of Warner. Awesome. I’ll just host them somewhere else, actually I already have. I’m so over all this shit.
Comment by Jordon from LA — January 5, 2009 @ 12:23 pm