YouTube Starts Selling Music, I Think

Nearly two years ago, Google dropped $1.65 billion on YouTube. As one can imagine, the company’s imagineers are trying to come up with all sorts of fun ways to make money, including a doohickey that links to Amazon’s MP3 store and iTunes from videos. There are also plans to sell concert tickets and merch and other things. Sounds neat, right?

Well, sort of. Instead of allowing this to become a thriving and exciting new marketplace for artists to promote and sell their wares, is this move really about more than Google/YouTube’s bottom line? YouTube garnered a reputation as something of a major copyright-infringer in its earliest days, but it’s recently started playing more nicely with major labels like EMI and Universal Music Group. With its copyright battle still raging with Viacom, Google is probably, more than anything, trying to placate its biggest content partners–the major media conglomerates. Basically, it’s another way of the site saying, “Look, we’re all in this together… now you can make even more money off the kid who taped the video off MTV and posted it!”

This is worrying:

Music labels could choose to place the e-commerce links next to their own videos or on videos uploaded by users, whose images or soundtrack they identified using YouTube’s Content ID system, which allows content owners to find unauthorized material on the site.

It all sounds great until you get to that part about “unauthorized material.” I can see the major labels using a wide definition of the term, one that asks the question “who gets to monetize what?” If an artist released a song on two different records on two different labels, and it’s a live video of said song, who gets the cut of that? Is there a pecking order based around which company has more money to throw at lawyers?

For example, this godheadSilo cover of “In The Air Tonight” I’m about to post for no reason other than it’s totally boss. W gets the MP3 link on that, if anyone does? What’s to stop Virgin or Atlantic from coming through and linking to Phil Collins from this, since the song was written by “their” artist? Or will users just bypass the helpfully embedded links and, if they’re inspired by buy something, head to their old reliable sources for digital music? Just like MySpace Music, record companies assume that “access and convenience” automatically equals “sales,” and that’s not necessarily a truism. (Artists, of course, have zero control over any of this.)

Google Puts Tunes From YouTube A Click Away [New York Times]