Of course I’m sure if you were to ask the record executives why they do this they go back to their usual defense is that doing so would hurt record sales. Yeah because I’m sure there are plenty of people out there that decided not to buy a song or record because a very low quality version of the video it is readily available on some dudes MySpace page. What is really bad is that it not at all hard to get around the “Embedded Disable by Request” thing. Granted I just choose not to do so with these music videos because I make a note not to piss off anyone who is litigation happy. So here is my plea to the UMG, please allow your videos to be embedded, not only will this not hurt your record sales; the more visibility of your music videos will undoubtedly increase sales.
Ms. Caillet’s video isn’t the only video recently that I haven’t been able to highlight because of the dreaded “Embedded Disable by Request” thing. High on the list is the video for Ryan Adam’s Halloweenhead that could have become a viral hit with quirky lyrics and old people dancing but lost that chance thanks to the similarly Walk it Out mash-up the floated around the web last week. UMG, you could have had that buzz with Halloweenhead, which came out earlier, but no on saw because people couldn’t be spread around the web because we couldn’t embed it.
Then there is the new Katharine McPhee song Love Story, which I declared the best song from her otherwise lackluster album. Again here is another song that has gotten zero buzz because UMG won’t let use feature it on out blogs. Granted I wanted to show this video so I could talk about how the further into obscurity McPhee falls, the less cloths she wear. Unfortunately she isn’t attractive enough to make the whole sex sells thing to work. Case in point, she is relegated to the cover of the third rate Men’s magazine Stuff the same month the sometimes moderately attractive Hilary Duff gets the cover of Maxim.
So for those of you that aren’t too lazy to click links here are the previously mentioned videos on YouTube that I am not allowed to embed:
Bubbly - Colbie Caillat (or download the Bubbly video on iTunes)
Halloweenhead (NSFW) - Ryan Adams (or download the Halloweenhead video on iTunes)
Love Story - Katharine McPhee (or download the Love Story video on iTunes)
On a completely unrelated not, to better understand you my audience, I have wanted to create a survey so I can make the 9th Green a better experience for all. As luck would have it, this past week Mike from Quibblo.com sent me an e-mail about his site that allows you to create surveys, polls, and quizzes. So I created a survey, The 9th Green Readers Poll, and if you subscribe to this blog or just stop by a couple times a month, please take a minute or two to fill it out and thanks to Mike for the heads up on his site.
Does UMG really think there's a huge difference between linking to a video and embedding it? People are going to see it either way, and more people are going to see it if it's embeddable. If UMG doesn't want people to see the video, why is it on Youtube in the first place?
ReplyDeleteThat makes about as much sense as requiring people to listen to CDs in the store and not at home. Let's hope they don't get any ideas like that.
I may just have to delete your comment just in case UMG checks out this site to keep them from getting an idea.
ReplyDeleteBut this is the record companies MO, they like taking very small baby steps at a time. What's funny is that of the artist that have their own YouTube account, they go ahead and let people embed (McPhee excluded for some reason) yet UMG doesn't let you embed the very same video if they have in their page.