It started out with EMI and Apple announcing that they would provide "premium" versions of EMI music with higher fidelity and NO DRM, kicking a major leg out from under the stool of the old music mogul's business model.
And if you want to watch Steve Jobs audition for his role as Gene Kelly, just watch the clip on this page at CNN, the one called "CNN's Max Foster talks to the heads of Apple and EMI about their musical collaboration". Jobs dance around why anyone would "prefer" lower quality and DRM crippled songs is delightful - in the way my 5 year old doing the Nutcracker was delightful. There is a man trying to justify deliberate, unnecessary, technologically enabled rent taking, staring straight into a dead end. A joy to watch.
Still, by the look of it the cessation of DRM stupidity is not far away. And then, this morning, there is THIS Copyrighted Clips Not That Important To YouTube?
AS MAJOR MEDIA COMPANIES CONTINUE to battle with YouTube, evidence is mounting that the video-sharing site is winning the fight for users' time -- with or without copyrighted clips. Online video metrics company Vidmeter Wednesday issued a report concluding that copyrighted clips accounted for a small proportion of the most viewed videos on the site.
For the study, Vidmeter looked at 6,725 of the most popular clips on the site between December and March -- the same time period when Viacom, News Corp and others publicly complained about copyright violations on the site.
The clips examined by Vidmeter garnered a total of around 1.59 billion views in that three-month time period. Just 621 of those clips, or less than 10%, were removed during that time for copyright violations; those expunged clips accounted for around 94 million views, or 6% of the total.
I've said since about 1996 that the net is NOT a media environment. YouTube is NOT a TV channel, it IS the present day equivalent of the old, battered, slightly out of tune piano in the parlour where family and friends gathered to share the pleasure of each other's company through singing along.
Most of them were OK, some of them were execrable and a very few had "The Voice" and brought tears to your eyes when they sang. But all of them were part of the family and were welcome for that.
YouTube, blogs, MySpace, Flickr, are all social tools where we can, however inexpertly and out of tune, produce for each other, where effort often counts as much as talent, just like my 5 year old dancing the Nutcracker; and when some flash git comes strolling in and takes over with his "professionally produced' stuff to "entertain" us hicks, he is just a pain in the butt.
The thing that the commercial media cannot seem to get is that in places like YouTube, their clips are as useful and uncontextual and unconversational as adverts, and NOT that important. The nastiest reality of all may be that, in these spaces they can't compete because it really, really, isn't their game.
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