Saturday, February 03, 2007
Retro Record Moment
I'm going to be scarce 'round these parts for a while, as I have some training going on at work for the next few weeks. So, an appropriate deplaning is the latest news from Viacom that they find newly acquired Google property YouTube to be an insufferable cyber-partner. Regular Ragged Thots readers know that I'm wont to throw up a YouTube object link in a New York Minute for some "great" music nugget I've stumbled over.
Perhaps Viacom is using this "pull-out" as a huge bargaining strategy with YouTube. If the other major media groups, like Universal, presently only have "short-term agreements", perhaps they too will threaten pull-outs from the social networking success. As far as Internet clips go, one could just as easily go to CBS.com to view Viacom material, but I think the real success of YouTube is that people who have sat on "bootleg" or other material unreleased to the general public have generated interest in music and shows that probably wouldn't have been generated in the first place. Without performing a massive and time-consuming search on Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, and other engines, where else would I find gems like
- Prince, Michael Jackson, and the late James Brown in an impromptu concert
- Pink Floyd videos for their first Syd Barrett helmed album, 1967's Piper at the Gates of Dawn
- An obscure video from a ska band that probably only I and the band itself remembers
- A guy with a passion for out-of-print vinyl that introduces me to a whole slew of records that I didn't know existed?
While my views on intellectual property jurisprudence are (only slightly) closer to former Buchananite Pat Choate than lefty Lawrence Lessig of Stanford, I think the media companies, once again are proving how short-sighted and tin-eared they are when it comes to marketing their very own products to the public. In the day and age of the Long-Tail and instant cyber-purchasing, I would gladly have paid money on I-Tunes or Windows Media Music for any of the above-mentioned links. What a shame that in the 21st Century global marketplace, media companies still have the "cassette tapes will destroy us" mentality from the late 1970s/early '80s ...
