YouTube has announced the winners of their 2015 YouTube Music Awards. See the list! More »
Our long national nightmare of not being able to find a sanctioned, high-quality copy of the video for “Dress You Up” on YouTube is almost over: Warner Music Group has apparently inked a deal with Google to stream its videos from the site once again. You may remember WMG’s snit at the end of last year—over money, natch—that resulted in all of its official content being pulled from the site. [Epicenter] More »
Today’s Internet curio that should hold your attention for at least 10 minutes: Yooouuutuuube, a Flash-heavy site that breaks down clips frame-by-frame, shrinks those frames down, then creates a huge matrix of flipbooks, each going through the embedded video on its own timetable. It’s one of those sites with a lot of rabbit-hole potential, which is why I’ve decided to share five clips that look pretty amazing when put through it; feel free to share your own. More »
Universal Music Group has decided to team up with Google’s money-hemorrhaging video site YouTube for a joint venture called Vevo, which will apparently “highlight” clips from the major-label behemoth and make money for everyone (maybe even artists? Haha, just kidding!) via ad revenue. What does this mean for you, the end user? Well, clips that use UMG-owned music—which right now are only available for YouTube viewing if you venture over to the site—will be embeddable on third-party sites, thanks to “a special VEVO branded embedded player,” which reads to me like code for “you’ll be clicking through lots of ads before you see that new Lil Wayne clip.”
It’s probably no coincidence that the announcement that the major labels’ attempt to create a Hulu-like destination site, PluggedIn, was shutting down came the same day that news got out about Universal Music Group’s attempts to make nice with YouTube. Music videos clog the “most viewed” charts on the streaming-video site, but they’ve proven tough to monetize, as evidenced by Universal not allowing third parties to embed clips so interested viewers are forced to visit ad-laden, cash-generating pages on YouTube itself. (Although if you go to YouTube to torture yourself with a clip from the new Chris Cornell album, you’re greeted by a bunch of ads for… Chris Cornell’s Scream.)
The Electric Six‘s “Jimmy Carter” is, as far as I’m concerned, the single best song ever written about the American presidency. (Well, the American presidency and boy bands.) But there are a lot of excellent runners-up!
YouTube + the concept of the round = just click. (And keep clicking.) (Also, sorry in advance about the incoming earworm.) [