Disable sharing
Imagine you are a member of a successful mega-band with expensive music videos and everything. You started out small, worked your way up, and now you’ve sold millions of albums. The band’s music is owned and distributed by a big Label, and the Label has reluctantly put your music videos online. It is easy to show that Music Labels are wary of video sharing sites (such as youtube) because the Labels often choose to disable sharing when they are given the option. Makes sense, right?
Since you’re a band member in our hypothetical mega-band, what this means to you in practical terms is that bloggers cannot put your videos in their blogs, among other things. Naturally, the music label wants to disable sharing, because they want fans to be dependent on the label to get band updates. In Internet terms, this is a de facto walled garden of content, which in the music labels’ ideal world would be something completely separate from the Internet.
Ideally, as a band member, you’ll get a cut of everything the Label sells, so there’s a lot to say for the walled garden concept. The big problem is this: by definition, sharing is disabled between the Internet and the walled garden. For as long as the Label was the best way to promote your music, there has never been any benefit to sharing content. Ever since broadcast radio music was used to promote albums, and even through the whole music video era, sharing has never played into the promotion scheme.
Maybe sharing should be a part of music promotion.
I’m not talking about ripping whole albums or bittorrent filesharing, per se, although there are some people would riff on this. They might go so far as to argue that if you give an artist some money as a result of downloading an entire album worth of mp3s, then that artist got some free promotion via filesharing. It’s happened before.
But I’m not even going to touch that. The situation I am talking about is when a music label on youtube clicks that one checkbox to “disable embedding.” In the picture below, these are some of the options youtube gives you.
It’s worth considering why someone would ever decide to disable sharing, but the inescapable observation is that many music labels have made this choice. A practical consequence is that they are missing out on potentially free promotion through the Internet. More on this point later.
