Perhaps chastened by the low ratings for Sunday’s telecast, the Grammy powers that be have allowed YouTube bootlegs of segments from the show to run wild, and right now the entire first page of the video-sharing site’s most popular music videos is made up of Grammy clips. More »
Channel-I-just-realized-I-have Russia Today spoke with Pirate Bay head Gottfried Svartholm Warg for a TV package on the site, which is currently facing legal action in its home country of Sweden. Warg’s interview was distilled down to the the now-standard answer that anyone charged with facilitating copyright infringement via hosting BitTorrent servers gives, which is that they’ve actually done no wrong because they’re merely pointing users to files that other people have uploaded. They’re really just like Google! Especially with the whole part about “monetizing searches,” according to the report.
People have watched one billion Universal Music Group videos on YouTube, according to a press release issued by the recorded-music behemoth and the video-sharing site. More »
What with their ability to make the young girls scream, it would be inevitable that angry teenagers have started to rail against the scourge of the Jonas Brothers. But instead of composing a ditty like “New Kids Got Run Over By A Reindeer” or graffiting “MORE LIKE N SUCK!!!” in their school’s ladies’ room, members of the Web 2.0 generation have taken their anti-moptop crusade to the Internet. On YouTube, for example, a video that opens with the greeting “Hello. If you are watching this and you are a Jonas Brothers fan you should kill yourself.” is rising up the “Most Popular” charts, no doubt in large part because lots of kids have vacation this week. The clip lays out boilerplate anti-boy-band rhetoric while also big-upping Slipknot and ripping the JBs’ bulletin board-posting fans for having “no clue of proper grammer and punctuation.” (Sigh. Kids today.) And it’s garnered 700-plus comments so far, which are so far evenly split between Jonas Brothers fans and their older brothers haters. But I’m pretty impressed by the rebuttals from young laurennmariexo, who composed an 18-point (!) treatise responding to the allegations laid out in the video:
After much speculation over who, exactly, was trying to get clips from Led Zeppelin’s Monday show at the O2 arena removed from YouTube, the culprit has come forth. And it’s not anyone at Warner Music Group, or even Jimmy Page himself. Instead, it’s the Brooklyn-based outfit GrayZone, which calls itself “the ‘bootbusters’ of the entertainment industry.” (Yes, really.) And it turns out that the mass removal being attributed to WMG was the result of a glitch, or at least what the company claimed as it explained itself to Silicon Alley Insider:
Diddy announced the winner of his YouTube personal assistant contest yesterday on Oprah: Lawyer Heather “Spelmansweetie” Thompson, whose slightly wooden audition video big-ups her time in the Peace Corps and her subscriptions to New York and The Economist. More »
The mournful cover of “Umbrella” above, by the singer Marié Digby, became something of a YouTube “hit” over the summer; to date, this clip alone has been watched 860,989 times, and her take on the Rihanna song even got play on the radio and The Hills. But today’s Wall Street Journal reveals that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Digby’s rise to YouTube “fame” was aided and abetted in a big way by the higher-ups at Disney’s Hollywood Records, who have had her on their roster since 2005:
YouTube and Universal Music Group are best friends forever, since apparently UMG’s channel is the Web site’s most must-see moneymaker. More »
YouTube is rolling out “overlay ads”–ads that pop up over the bottom half of a video’s screen for about 10 seconds–on the channels of 1,000 content partners today; during trials, the video-sharing site found that these ads had a staggering 75% click-through rate. More »
Like most music nerds in their late twenties, MTV’s 120 Minutes was a staple of my adolescence, and a prime influence on my taste in indie and alternative rock. Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, anyone can troll around for almost any video that would have ever aired on the program, but the anonymous curator of 120minutes.tumblr.com improves on that by posting five embedded alt-rock classics per page, roughly approximating the experience of watching the show by adding a sense of continuity and an element of surprise.
