Why I Am Sad About The YouTube
Youtube kind of changed my life in a way, so I’ve been pretty grateful for it over the past year and a bit, and still am, though more reluctantly now. It remains my number one source of blog traffic and musical exposure. Which is annoying at this particular ‘juncture’ because I’d really like to go the way I did with Myspace and boycott those m—–f—ers.
I’m just very sad for my friend and very angry at Google. Youtube (Google) is screwing people over who don’t, by any means, deserve to be getting screwed over. My pal Doron (a long time Youtube performer of wonderful music), just got screwed royally.
I’m aware that Google getting their asses sued left and right by the copyright police, but I’m also aware that Google have the power to fight back, unlike we little people. I’m also aware that those other bastards don’t go around pretending they’re not bastards and spouting some ‘motto’ like, “Don’t Be Evil.” It’s sure nice to know that “Don’t Be Evil” doesn’t extend to not passing the brunt of your legal problems (unecessarily) down to your users.
Sure, they now have to make people take down copyrighted material in order to cover their own asses — sucky, but fair enough. That, however absolutely does not excuse them permanently deleting entire accounts over (in many cases unintended, in many cases questionable) copyright infringements when they can easily just suspend the accounts until the problem videos are taken down. That’d be the “un-evil” thing to do.
But I’ve figured out what they really mean by “Don’t Be Evil”. They don’t mean they won’t be evil (if that were the case, their slogan would read more like, “Hey, We’re Not Evil.”). No, they’re telling you not to be evil …(do as they say, not as they do)… for example, don’t use their services in the ways they were really set up to be used (I mean come on), and which made them super-ridiculously successful in the first place.
But this is all pointless ranting (though it sure feels good). They’re Google, they can do whatever they want now that they’re the big internet monopoly-monster, at least to us non-billionaires they can.
GETTING TO THE POINT — Please check out Doron’s brief video about all this (under his new account, of course): Why Cougarman7 (Doron Diamond) Disappeared. Also, check out his other videos because they’re great! I’ve featured his guitar tutorials here many times. He’s one of the best I know doing this sort of thing, plus he’s a delighful person!
If you’re a former subscriber of his (I know our subscriberships overlapped quite a bit), please resubscribe. Because that’s the most tragic thing of all, losing connection with all the fans he’s deservedly earned over the nearly 2 years he’s been posting videos. The videos themselves, he can re-upload, but all the wonderful comments he’s recieved over the years are gone and his fanbase could take a long time to rebuild. Don’t let that happen. Show him you’re a tiger. Show him you care.
[And a note to fellow Youtube posters: You might want to back up your account. From what I’m hearing and reading, it’s becoming quite common practice at Youtube to delete accounts without warning for even minor infringements (as in Doron’s case). What I’m doing is archiving all my important Youtube pages using Furl (which is a bookmarking site like del.icio.us, but with an archiving feature so you’re actually saving the full content of the webpage, not just the URL). If you have a lot of subscribers that you don’t want to lose touch with, you may want to save them and look into a Contact Management System (not to be confused with Content Management System, though those are good too), particularly if you’re a band/musician. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, but Doron’s misfortune (unfortunately) pushes it to the top of the list.
Anyway, nuf said. Good luck, and may none of you (nor I) ever have to see this in realtime:
Music Strategy Guru of the Day :: Bruce Warila
I’ve been devouring the “unsprung wisdom” of newly discovered (by me) Bruce Warila this morning. I was impressed by his comments on the following post by Andrew Dubber, and happy was I to find that he has his own blog. He seems to know his shit and provides some good counter-insights to those of Andrew, who also seems to know his shit in these areas, so the plot has just thickened. The fact that they both make excellent arguments while disagreeing on several points is a great thing. I’m really thinking now. I’m reminded anew to stay on my toes and keep questioning when in comes to all these theories going around about the direction of music and the music industry.
It’s important that we as artists pay close attention to this stuff (that’s why I’m excited about this Bruce guy and passing it on to you), but also that, above all else, we trust our own instincts and rely on our own creativity. Nomatter how informed or expert someone may be in these areas, they don’t know it all, and there are other pieces to the puzzle.
But, that said, I’ve been “tumblr-quoting” the hell out of Bruce’s stuff, my non-bullshit detector (the oppposite of my bullshit detector) going off like crazy, and that’s a good sign that he’s onto some important things. He’s certainly sparking a lot of creative thought for me, even getting me re-excited about business strategies (a wave I need to ride when it’s high, so I’m going to wrap this up with some quotes now). Most significant to me is what he’s getting at in this post:
“A MySpace page dotted with fancy graphics, YouTube videos, slide shows and images, and a shitty music player was great in 2005, but this is 2007! A page of stuff is no longer compelling. We need something that really blows the socks off people.”
“Advice: Time to pick up the pace people. You need to learn how to be entertaining on the Internet. You may want to go out and buy the TV (yourband.tv) domain for your band. You need to start looking at your band like a television network. Have a filmmaker and a writer join your band, choose a theme, write a story, lash in your music, create episodes, write notes about your story on your blog, engage fans, develop characters, have a storyline, create a soundtrack, etc. Stop using your Internet presence to be INFORMATIVE, use it to be ENTERTAINING!”
“Nobody is going to make money selling $.99 cent downloads. Sell your music to some and give it away to everyone else that refuses to pay for music. Use your music as the bait that brings people into your shows and onto your new ENTERTAINING website/blog. If you make great music and you are entertaining, you will make money. By the time you learn how to incorporate story, basic film making, blogging, and how to be episodic - into your repertoire, the industry will have the tools you need to profit from all of your efforts - and your registered fans.”
Gyrus On Glamour
In response to my recent post about Glamour!, fellow godstar and friend of the show Gyrus had this little brilliant snippet to add to the conversation (in an email, but quoted here with permission) :
“I guess we who critique Western civilization have a tendency to react to the whole surface artifice thing, and being more “natural” ends up being associated with being plain and a bit grubby! But how many indigenous people spend ages adorning and beautifying themselves? And hey, if you want natural, check out all those birds with stupendous plumage! We really do need to rediscover that natural parading and glorifying, without getting sucked too far into the mass-media gloss that parasitizes that sort of stuff … It seems like a strange issue to get involved with as we teeter on the brink of ecological catastrophe… but oddly it seems important. Maybe it’s important to us people who’ve invested so much energy in suppressing that natural strutting about… Now’s the time when people with ideas like ours need to get noticed more!”
New Music Strategies (Amazon Is Still Falling Short)
DRM-free is great and all, as is any healthy competition for iTunes. But you know how else you can get DRM-free music, plus not give iTunes or Amazon or any big record company any money at all, and just support artists on your own terms, as one human being to another according to how much you actually value their work? I do. Most people do, whether they choose to engage in it or not.
It’s actually two things in combination. The first is file-sharing, the second is donating. And plenty of people are choosing to engage in both — if more often the first of the two. But that’s the messy, realistic reality of things, like it or not, Elton. Why the hell fight it? I ask that not just in the sense of “why bother fighting the inevitable”, but in the sense that it’s not something that should be fought. It’s a positive r/evolutionary trend, both a cause and effect of old metaphors being outgrown and new, better, more expansive metaphors taking their place.
Radiohead is with it enough to see this and to actually live in the present (which in some sense requires also living in the future). Radiohead are clearly forward-thinking people who understand media and marketing (see TIME’s article “Radiohead Says: Pay What You Want” if you haven’t already). And they aren’t the only progressive thinkers willing — in fact, happy — to face and embrace the evolving reality of the music business (and all business, and life itself), to see the good in what’s going on and to find constructive ways to begin facilitating it, actively, now. Radiohead are just the most famous.
If you are a musician, artist, entrepreneur, whatever — person — you can’t afford to wait idly by for the ‘new music industry’ (or whatever industry) train to slow down and stop before you hop on board. It’s not gonna slow down or stop, so you better start moving, if you’re not already. Andrew Dubber is a smart person and here’s a smart thing he has to say about this (From his New Music Strategies Manifesto):
“…changes are still underway, and it is a process of navigation, not a process of conversion from an old model to a new one. By the time you have adapted you will be obsolete again. Develop a strategy for keeping up.”
Every second and every dollar you invest in the old business model is essentially a step backwards. Not a good move in a situation where you need to be not only keeping up, but preferably staying ahead of the curve, and better yet, actively participating in the direction of the ‘curve’ itself. As such, I have compiled for you a starter-kit of essential study materials to help you in this endeavor:
The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online (by Andrew Dubber)
New Music Strategies Manifesto (also by Andrew Dubber)
The Wu Tang Manual
And the following awesome conversations going on over at Tim’s place:
Pay What You Want
Rock Stars Need Not Apply
(no doubt these awesome conversations will be continuing in future posts and threads here, at Tim’s and at Andrew’s, so I would subscribe to / bookmark us all if I were me, and I am, and I have. You should too, mkay).
Internet Fasting
Won’t be on here much in the next week atall, atall. Need to let my brain breath… So… later suckers.
PS: that time when I called you suckers… I didn’t mean it.