Is YouTube Bad for Music?
Summary
These days, thanks to Google’s advances in music licensing, you can find just about any song on YouTube in seconds – and watch the video to boot, assuming you even want to. Rather than pulling their music from the site, most of the major labels embraced it by creating a joint venture with YouTube (Vevo). YouTube’s strength as a free music source might be hurting music subscriptions and, by extension, artists by offering users a free place to hear just about any song they want – the same core function for which Rhapsody hopes you’ll pay $10 a month. For example, Last.fm, MySpace’s own iLike (even when MySpace offers its own full-song music subscription), Bump, Discovr and Muziic, among others, choose to embed YouTube videos as a method of including full songs without paying for a license themselves or integrating a subscription service that would ultimately generate more revenue for artists than those YouTube ads. We contacted two normally helpful YouTube spokespeople and gave them plenty of time to address this issue, but neither responded to our queries.