Sunday, December 02, 2007
Official YouTube Cheap Shot
Labels: GOP 2008 President, Rudy Giuliani, satire, YouTube
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Retro Music Moment
Just when I think my fascination with YouTube is about to wane, there's always something that I come across as a music fan that just makes me take notice. Prepare to throw out your copies of "Ebony and Ivory" (if you're not still using them as coasters) and listen up to a more truthful (and soulful pairing) of Stevie Wonder with a major "mainstream" artist.
Watching this, I was reminded of the documentary Baseball which I caught a glimpse of this past weekend on my local PBS station. I had to chuckle as the narrator told the story of how Major League team owners were scared to death that radio broadcasting of America's national pastime in the 1920s and '30s would kill stadium ticket sales. Instead of killing ticket sales, the broadcasts widened baseball's popularity bringing out MORE fans to stadiums. Tickets sales went wild, as women and whole families enjoyed a stadium outing, not just young, single men. Reminds me a lot of the present music and media industry and its inability to deal with music distribution of its vast (and often unreleased) catalogue, sales, and 21st century technology.
What the hell is wrong with record and media companies when they are sitting on material like this and refuse to make it available commercially, especially in a digital age when the cost to market is so minuscule? Then they get indignant when some person pulls a video like this from their private stash and makes it available on YouTube to a yokel like me. Yes, music industry, there are people who are actually fans of both Stevie Wonder AND Glen Campbell and would have payed a couple of bucks on I-Tunes for this! (Having been born an hour away from Clarksville, the subject of the one of the Monkee's first singles, this brother feels a connection to the Wichita Lineman who played guitar on many of their records)
With that in mind, I hope RT Regular (and Dylan fanatic) Rodak enjoys the cover!
Labels: Glen Campbell, Music Industry, Stevie Wonder, YouTube
Monday, May 21, 2007
Drive-Bias Shooting
Given sites like Real Clear Politics, Red State and Town Hall, I'm not so sure gap is as wide on the activist side as it may be on the party-structure side. However, there is one quote in here that just drives me up the frickin' wall:
And Republicans are hardly conceding the fight in the 2008 campaign.Grrr..."the liberal bias" of YouTube? Oh, give me a break, please! Stop the whining, for the love of God!
Besides TechRepublican, the group blog started two weeks ago by All, who worked as communications director for Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), there is QubeTV, founded in March as an alternative to what one of its founders, Charlie Gerow, a former Reagan campaign aide, calls "the liberal bias" of YouTube.
The charge of "liberal bias" in the mainstream media had a resonance at one time, because people like Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, (and their print counterparts), etc. made statements that conservatives could credibly argue were, indeed, liberal. Even if there was no intent to push an explicit liberal agenda, many stories were broadcast (and written) based on a liberal premise of public policy. For example, the story might ask why more funds weren't being made available for child-care: The premise is liberal because a fair question could be asked why government should be paying for child-care in the first place. That's just one example of possible "liberal bias" in a mainstream media story.
That occurred at a time when the anchors, producers, editors, writers, etc. all came from a similar background, went to the same parties, same schools, etc. The mainstream media was run by group think -- and some places like The New York Times, CBS News, etc. are still run that way.
But there is so much more media out there right now. Media is a much more democratic (small-"d") entity. That includes talk radio. That certainly includes blogs. And it certainly includes YouTube. But how can YouTube be liberally "biased"? It's open to everyone -- unlike the Old Media entities. Anyone can post anything (within standards of decency, of course) they want, from any point of view.
Or no point of view, as the case may be.
But now, Charlie Gerow (who I've met a few times -- perfectly nice guy) feels the need to create a "conservative" YouTube, thus encouraging conservative video creators to abandon YouTube -- and making a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Create a YouTube competitor if you want, but drop the "bias" BS, please!
(The same argument, by the way, holds for charges of bias at Wikipedia, though that is a little more dicey, given how entries can be more easily sabotaged by people with political agendas and other axes to grind.)
Labels: liberal bias, Mainstream Media, YouTube
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 ...
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
I.P., Freely
(Okay, so I bit off of a very old Simpsons joke for the headline. It's post-holiday, and my brain is fried)
While the battle for crafting a modern intellectual property (I.P.) jurisprudence to deal with evolving technology rages on, and IT leaders like Google and YouTube push the limits of such I.P. boundaries, let us enjoy for the moment the availability of rare gems such as this 1966 music video of The Temptations, featuring Arte Johnson of Laugh-In (SNL and Mad-TV wish they were half as funny as a single episode of Laugh-In):
One of the problems I have with I-Tunes and practically ALL of the so-called legitimate music downloading services is the paucity of offerings to the discerning customer. Sure, if you’re interested in the latest warbling and butt-shaking of untalented pole dancers on BET, MTV, or VH-1 (or as Ben Folds so aptly phrased it in his song “Rocking The Suburbs,” “some producer with computers / fixes all my sh*tty tracks these days”) there is plenty to be had. However, try to find some lightweight 1980s chestnut like General Public’s second album Hand To Mouth, let alone some esoteric Frank Sinatra work like Watertown, and you’re back to sorting through used record store bins, or hoping that you get lucky on Amazon or E-Bay.
Case in point: I searched YouTube to see if someone had uploaded a video clip of the opening theme for the TV show Mannix. The theme song, written by the great Argentinean jazz composer Lalo Schifrin (who is more famous for the Mission: Impossible theme) was my introduction to jazz and big band arrangements as a pre-schooler in the late 1960s. A wonderful gentlemen who goes by the handle VinylJunkie1960 had uploaded a recording from the out-of-print soundtrack.
Now, I’m sure that some I.P. legal eagle would jump all over YouTube and our friend for uploading the recording. I would claim fair use, as it is evident that VinylJunkie’s intent is to generate interest in forgotten music as a video editorialist, not deprive the copyright owner of subsequent reproductions or sales.
Had the soundtrack to Mannix been available on I-Tunes, however, VinylJunkie’s post made me immediately want to purchase the whole album. Has ANYONE at the record conglomerates read The Long Tail yet, and realized that there is money to made off of the gems stored in their vaults? And do the music moguls recognize the value of people like VinylJunkie in generating potential sales and interest for a nominal cost to the copyright owners? In the early 1990s, Apple enthusiast Guy Kawasaki used to refer to such people like VinylJunkie as “evangelists.” They spread "the gospel" of the favored product, with little to no marketing costs to the manufacturer. It would be nice if the music conglomerates “got religion” and started moving more product besides Jessica Simpson’s inane screeching into the cyber realm.
Labels: Evangelism, Intellectual Property, Lalo Schifrin, Laugh-In, Temptations, YouTube
