Those are fair points, and I agree that YouTube removed the music labels' content. Personally, while I sympathize with the songwriters complaining about YouTube's removal of their content -- after all, they have a gun to their heads: if they force YouTube to remove the material, then that material just gets fileshared, so they lose either way --, I think they're in the wrong on that count. Either way, this really wouldn't be a problem if people didn't download music illegally. That's the fundamental problem. It's what gives YouTube the ability to say, "no, we won't pay that price." -- the implicit corollary being, "and if we don't pay you, nobody will, because no sovereign, ISP, or consumer is willing to respect your property rights". I think that's what the songwriters find galling.
Interesting. I occasionally watch music videos on YouTube, and I try to watch the official one whenever possible, because all else being equal, I'd like to see people get paid. I think there's a ton of money to be made off of the monetization of the goodwill fans have towards a band. If a musician says, "here, look at the Coke polar bears dance for a while while you download my music, this helps me get paid," I think he'll make a lot of money. Not as much as he's getting for CDs, but hey, something is better than nothing. And if the labels keep things going as they are, nothing is what they're going to get. The iTunes store isn't really the solution: much of the time, people want to pay for music @ .22p a listen, not $1.00 a download.
> The iTunes store isn't really the solution: much of the time, people want to pay for music @ .22p a listen, not $1.00 a download.
I totally agree, that's why I mentioned Spotify as well as iTunes. Although Spotify works off a flat-rate model, it could equally work on a per-play micropayment model.
