Viral Music Videos A Problem For RIAA

prostoalex writes "A few years ago music videos were considered promotional, a tease to get the viewer to buy the whole album. However, now that a commercial market for music videos is springing up, the music industry is not quite happy with YouTube, iFilm, Google Video and other video sharing sites distributing the music videos of famous artists. Billboard magazine says: 'The RIAA estimates that sales of music videos topped $3.7 million in three months, after being introduced in October. Meanwhile, the major labels also are sharing in the profits of ad-supported video-on-demand offerings from AOL, Yahoo, Music Choice and others. That is revenue the music industry is keenly interested in protecting. Hopes are that YouTube and others will ink similar deals with the industry in the long run.'"

Dear **AA:

[Avillia]

No one gives a fuck that you think you should get paid for the "right" to help you advertise. Your attempts to charge for the flow of information have failed horibly in every aspect. Maybe if you would stop making shitty, cut and publish content and allow your customers some of the most basic rights, you would get more respect from mankind. However, you continue to attempt to make pathetic laws and bombard the public with blatant lies and slander wherever appliable, and thus no one cares that you can't buy yourselves another $200,000 stretch and a nice new diamond ring for your wife while African children starve to death.

Signed,
The World.

proof the RIAA is ISN'T insane

[EvanED]

If anything, it's proof that the RIAA isn't insane, and realizes that it needs to control different distribution channels if it's gonna last more than another decade.

They want people to pay to watch commercials!?

[Xenographic]

If they expect people to pay to watch what are, in essence, commercials, or even to have the "priveledge" of showing their commercials on your site, well, screw 'em :]

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go find something, anything, to pirate after the shameful and possibly illegal things they did to the Pirate Bay the other day.

Huh?

[iamdrscience]

$3.7M sounds like a relatively small amount of money to be spread across an entire industry. It seems like the advertising they get from the videos would be more valuable than that, especially considering that inevitably a lot of that $3.7M is going towards keeping videos off of free sites (legal fees, etc.).

It also seems a little foolish for the RIAA because while some of the videos on YouTube and the like are videos record companies could make money off of, the majority of them are videos that are too old or obscure.

awwwww poor RIAA

[jkfresh]

Awww, something else for the RIAA to whine about.

Ya know, this shit gets old. I wish I could blame somebody else when I make less money than I would like. If something doesn't turn out the way I want, it has to be the fault of someone else.

Fuck the RIAA. You cocksuckers are a bunch of whiney-ass motherfuckers. Get down on my dick while I rape your shit off usenet. There is no reason to pay for anything anymore, especially music and movies. Why should I finance the war on fair use?

If I deprive the artists of the $0.10 that they might have made had I bought their cd, well that's a fucking dime. They make money when they tour. It is worth more to deprive the Media Mafia of their ill-gotten gains.

I used to buy a lot of music. Now I just don't give a shit.

Fuck the RIAA, fuck your bought-off legislators, and while you bitches are at it suck my dick.

Re:Wonder what it would take to make the *AA happy

[drivekiller]

Personally, I think it would be sort of sucky for a few months, but if everyone just stopped buying music and videos from *AA affiliated musicians, perhaps the hint would work.

"sucky"? I think it would be fabulous. It's time to get serious. Call or write your local commercial radio station and tell them you are boycotting all their advertisers for supporting the RIAA. We must do everything we can to stop these RIAA-related articles from showing up on slashdot.

O-Zone (Numa Numa)

[kent.dickey]

The music industry doesn't seem to know how to make money anymore.

Just take the Numa Numa video on the internet from a year ago. This is a potential hit song made popular in the US from the "Numa Numa" video at http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/206373 [newgrounds.com] that went nowhere on the buying charts due to pure stupidity of the recording industry. If you liked this song, you couldn't buy it.

iTunes only added it to their collection well after the interest in it subsided (and I bought it then). Sure it was in Romanian, but that really wasn't a big deal--just look at the success of 99 Luftballooons from 20 years ago.

The record industry is over-focused on piracy from folks who would never buy their music anyway. The positive word-of-mouth of a good song more than outweighs any piracy of a good song. And the greedy executives don't realize they'll make more money when teenagers grow up and *buy* music from nostalgia then they'll ever get from the same people when they are teenagers. But if the greedy recording companies force teenagers to get their music through piracy because they have no alternative, then those customers may be gone for good.

I'm old enough to know what I want in music, and as best as I can tell, the recording industry doesn't want to sell it to me at any price. They want to sell me their crap instead.

Re:Pay?? For a music video??

[mh101]

I agree. I've downloaded many music videos to see them, and with few exceptions they're not something I'm going to watch repeatedly, and I delete them afterwards. In fact, I find many music videos are just plain boring, even though I really like the song.

I bought the DVD with Weird Al Yankovic's videos, because I found them to be quite entertaining, and they actually add to the song. If more people could make music videos that were truly entertaining, then maybe there would be a reason to buy them other than just because you're a die-hard fan. But to be fair, I imagine it's much easier to make an entertaining comedy video to go with comedy music, than dramatic/artistic videos for other styles of music.

Subject

[Legion303]

Pardon me for not giving a fuck what the music industry likes. It hasn't given a fuck what I like for years.

Re:proof the RIAA is insane - Every Note

[CTalkobt]

Ya know, phrased like that I might actually support the RIAA. No more ultra bad versions of Stairway to Heaven when I walk in the musical instrument store.

Re:proof the RIAA is ISN'T insane

[Jugalator]

Too bad that no corporation can control "different distribution channels" on the Internet then.

Sure, they can try, like they did with The Pirate Bay, but it's a different question if they'll succeed.

Re:Erm.

[castrox]

No worries. Us Swedes will hang our minister of justice and continue to mock MPAA et. al. In fact he's already facing constitutional questioning, something I'll be sure to watch. Interesting that the governments website is still DDOS'ed.

I have the solution to piracy...

[BobSutan]

If the MPAA and RIAA have such a problem with copyright infringement, I have the perfect solution: Lets just take away copyright from music and movies. Seriously. I ask you this, what makes movies and music a "useful art" worthy of protection? What value does it add to the life of American citizens? The country has changed, and for the worse. Instead of protecting the things that we once valued as bettering society, we now protect the things that allow the powers-that-be to make money. And that's just plain wrong. In fact its as un-American as you can get and just goes to illustrate how capitalism has led to the abject greed that is sending the nation down the toilet. IMO we need to worry less about bogeyman terrorists and focus on the true threat to this country, which are greedy businessmen corruption this nation's soul. /rant