Children to permanently work around age ratings, government announces

The entirely pyrrhic move of making pop videos display age ratings (or, rather, some pop videos on a couple of platforms) has achieved whatever low bar of success it was aiming for, and will now have its pointless life extended permanently, the government has announced.

So far, the BBFC has rated a massive 132 videos from the estimated 10 million plus music videos (about one third of videos on YouTube are music videos of one type or another; Quora estimates there's more than 80 million videos on the service).

I'm assuming the idea is that you're so unlikely to find an age rating on a video that you'd forget the way your workaround the requirement to prove your age by the next time you come across one.

The equally vapid labelling will apply to Vevo as well.

Embed and breakfast man: Revolver

Apparently, before yesterday, this wasn't on YouTube:

And if that seems unlikely, here's someone who should know saying it's a first:

REVOLVER - Crimson - first time on Youtube! https://t.co/a8rD8sMA1m via @YouTube

— Mat Flint (@matflint) August 15, 2015

Music popular-ish on YouTube

MusicAlly has done some analysis of what's popular on YouTube:

The headline stat is that music accounted for 62 of the top 250 channels ranked by annual views in 2014, with 43 of those falling under the Vevo banner.

In other words, music doesn't dominate YouTube, but it is mostly significant, but what really thrives are channels run by the big labels.

This is quite interesting:

Also notable: the low ranking for some of the traditional stars of social/digital media: Justin Bieber had the 43rd most popular YouTube channel in 2014 – admittedly a quiet year for him musically – while Lady Gaga was 158th and Britney Spears 203rd.

Although I think that says more about what MusicAlly thinks is happening on social media (All three stars are long past their buzz stage, surely?)

Billy Bragg on wrong side of history, again

Billy Bragg is having a terrible year - having backed the South Bank and its sponsors against the Undercroft skaters, he's now had to apologise to Taylor Swift.

See, when Swift pulled her music from Spotify, Bragg concluded somehow that this was because she was clambering into bed with Google:

"If Ms Swift was truly concerned about perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free, she should be removing her material from YouTube, not cosying up to it," Bragg said.

"Given that this year is the first to fail to produce a new million selling album, I can understand Taylor Swift wanting to maximise her opportunities with the new record – and it worked: she shifted 1.28m copies of 1989 in the first week of sale. But she should just be honest with her fans and say “sorry, but Sergey Brin gave me a huge amount of money to be the headline name on the marquee for the launch of You Tube Music Key and so I’ve sold my soul to Google,” Bragg continued.

"Google are going after Spotify and Taylor Swift has just chosen sides," wrote Bragg. "That’s her prerogative as a savvy businesswoman - but please don’t try to sell this corporate power play to us as some sort of altruistic gesture in solidarity with struggling music makers."

There's two problems here: the first, that Swift's pulling of music from Spotify is unconnected with her selling over a million copies of her album. How dispiriting it is that Bragg assumes her sales are simply a function of a basic supply and demand curve; that it is the scarcity of supply rather than the quality of the experience that has seen 1989 fly off shelves or down wires or whatever it is records actually do now.

The second, more important problem was Bragg's accusation that Swift was acting not out of principle but greed was... well, it was very wide of the mark. Here's his climbdown:

"I want to apologise to Taylor Swift for accusing her of selling her soul to Google," wrote Bragg on Facebook. "I have learned that her music will not now be available on the new YouTube Music Key service, which launched this week."

So, sorry about that. Bragg then launches into an explanation of how he got confused, based on how he'd read in The Observer that Google had used Swift's music at the launch, and then goes into a bit of a ramble about how music being available for free on the internet made him do it.

The time will surely come when content creators have to band together to challenge deals done between rights holders and service providers, details of which are kept from artists and their representatives. If Ms Swift is going to lead that fight for transparency, she will have my full support.

I'm sure she'll be delighted to have your full support, Billy. Perhaps not in the research department.

On the other hand, Bragg did have a good joke to end on:

I would like to add that I will be boycotting the first media outlet to use the headline ‘Bragg makes Swift apology’

It's a good gag, but perhaps having accused a person of selling their soul to Google for a large sum of money requires more than a boom-tish.

UKIPtube: Farageland

As Mike Read's calypso fades into the past, here's a UKIP parody that's actually funny - Attila The Stockbroker's Clash-meets-UKIP Farageland:

Conor Maynard gets a glimpse of the future

Conor Maynard is one of the "stars" doing that Channel 4 "Stars At Your Service" thing. They've made the poor guy go and work at a chip shop, which, given he's still described as a YouTube sensation is a bit like being made to confront your older self.

Saffron Stevens, 17, of Sneinton, said it was “crazy” to see a celebrity with 17 million Youtube hits turn up to batter and flog cod.

Yes, it's absolutely ridiculous that he's selling cod, which is a species under threat, he should be serving pollock or something a bit more responsible.

Oh, you think it's odd that he's doing that job with his 17 million YouTube hits. You know who else has 17 million YouTube hits?

These guys. Admittedly, it'd be surprising if box kitten turned up to work in a chip shop, but not because of the number of YouTube views.

Still, the people of Sneinton know what the real story is here:

Jodie Jarecki, 16, who also lives nearby, said she was excited to see her neighbourhood on the TV.

“I’m glad he came here because it’s the best chip shop in the area. given he’s a celebrity he had to come to a the premier chip shop around here.”

“I’m just here for the chips,” said friend Aaliyah Raffell.

They seem convinced the celebrity is the chips, and the task that's been set the chips is working with this guy off the internet.

I don't think they're wrong.

YouTube, Indies at war

Regardless of the other rights and wrongs, threatening to block certain labels' videos on YouTube unless the label does a deal over a separate product is a bit of an asshatty move by Google.

The BBC understands that even if blocks do go ahead, content from artists signed to independent labels will remain available on YouTube via channels such as Vevo.

Videos which are exclusively licensed by independent record labels, such as acoustic sets or live performances, may be taken down.

Thanks for that, Google. Good to see the not being evil going so well.

Last FM tries something else, hopes it doesn't smell desperate

Last FM hasn't exactly been thriving in the last couple of years, what with Spotify basically doing what it did, but much better. (Because, face it, if you want to hear the Dum Dum Girls, you want to hear the Dum Dum Girls, not a bunch of bands that other people who wanted to hear the Dum Dum Girls listened to when they weren't able to listen to the band they wanted to hear.)

But now, Last FM have revived their player. They've got a question to ask:

“Ever wondered what radio would be like with video?"

Well, no, because (i) that'd be MTV and (ii) that wouldn't be radio.

It's like asking 'ever wondered what a car would be like with two floors, eighty seats and a timetable which requires it stop every so often to pick up passengers', and hoping that people won't notice what used to be a car is now a bus.

So the player - or at least the beta version - is now throwing out YouTube videos instead of music streams. MusicAlly reframes the question in a more honest way:

Although from a business perspective, it’s more about wondering what a personal radio service would be like with YouTube absorbing the licensing costs.

In the UK, Last FM remains twice as popular as MySpace, but... well, that's not saying very much, is it? It's also more popular than kidney stones. But there's hope, reckons MusicAlly:

Plenty of work to do for a comeback, then, but it’s worth noting that if Last.fm was launching in its current form today, as a YouTube-scraping personal radio service with big-data features in the background, it’d be all over the tech blogs as the Next Big Digital Thing.

Yes, because if there's one thing YouTube is lacking, it's access to a massive data-crunching operation crammed with detail about people's tastes and behaviour. If you ignore it being part of Google, obviously. If you factor that in, it's not entirely clear what Last FM might have to bring that's new.

YouTube Music Awards

There are rush-hour Underground Circle line trains which are less overcrowded than the music awards season, so the arrival of yet another set of prizes is less a cause for celebration than the organisers of The YouTube Music Awards might think.

Here, lifted from Hypebot (who sat through the live-streamed event and deserve a medal of their own for that dedication to duty) are the winners:

Breakthrough of the Year
WINNER: Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
Kendrick Lamar
Naughty Boy
Passenger
Rudimental

Response of the Year
WINNER: Lindsey Stirling and Pentatonix, "Radioactive"
Boyce Avenue (feat. Fifth Harmony) "Mirrors"
Jayesslee, "Gangnam Style"
ThePianoGuys, "Titanium/Pavane"
Walk Off the Earth (feat. KRNFX), "I Knew You Were Trouble"

Innovation of the Year
WINNER: DeStorm, "See Me Standing"
Anamanaguchi, "Endless Fantasy"
Atoms For Peace, "Ingenue"
Bat For Lashes, "Lilies"
Toro Y Moi, "Say That"

YouTube Phenomenon
WINNER: "I Knew You Were Trouble"
"Diamonds"
"Gangnam Style"
"Harlem Shake"
"Thrift Shop"

Video of the Year
WINNER: Girls' Generation "I Got A Boy"
Demi Lovato, "Heart Attack"
Epic Rap Battles Of History, "Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney"
Justin Bieber (feat. Nicki Minaj), "Beauty and a Beat"br> Lady Gaga, "Applause"
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (feat. Mary Lambert) "Same Love"
Miley Cyrus, "We Can't Stop"
One Direction, "Best Song Ever"
PSY, "Gentleman"
Selena Gomez, "Come & Get It"

Artist of the Year
WINNER: Eminem
Epic Rap Battles Of History
Justin Bieber
Katy Perry
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis
Nicki Minaj
One Direction
Psy
Rihanna
Taylor Swift

The most notable surprise here is that Harlem Shake was only this year - and yet already mention of it sits alongside 'chocolate coming off the ration' and 'that bloke blowing the candle out on the first night of BBC Two' in the distant past.

Thom Yorke challenged over consistency

Thom Yorke, as we all know, despises Spotify. Not quite enough to pull Radiohead music from the service, but certainly enough to keep his less-lucrative side projects away from it.

Writing on Hypebot, though, Eliot Van Buskirk points out an even odder inconsistency in Yorke's position:

Do you know which on-demand services pays less than Spotify per stream, and doesn’t even include a premium version for people who might be willing to pay (although there have been weird rumblings about that)?

YouTube. And Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace music is all over that on-demand music service, including in the above video, which includes the entire Atoms For Peace album. XL Recordings, Atoms for Peace’s label, has official versions up there as well.

The last time we ran the calculations, the musical force of nature Psy (remember him?) made about a third of a cent per view from his monetized music on YouTube.
[...]
one recent estimate put Spotify payouts to one artist at .4 cents per song.

In other words, regardless of who owns it, Spotify pays out more than YouTube. The two numbers are closer than one might imagine, considering that over six million people pay for Spotify, and nobody pays for YouTube, but there they are.

Curious.

Embed and breakfast man: The Music Muddle

You're a musician. You need a guiding a hand. But who to turn to?

The answer? Tim Bick, providing insight hard-won through years in the industry...


"When you go into a music shop, as I do, you'll inevitably find someone playing House Of The Rising Sun..."

There's more on YouTube.

[Thanks to @curiousiguana for the tip]

Embed and breakfast man: The Snapdragons

Back in 2007, during the These Animal Men commandments weekend (yes, it was a thing), I lamented that The Snapdragon's Doleboys on Futons wasn't available on YouTube.

In the meantime, though, as all culture every is hoovered into Google's maws, the track has turned up:



Wait long enough, and everything will turn up on YouTube. (That's meant to sound threatening, by the way.)

[Buy: Snapdragons]

YouTube streams now count towards the US chart. May god have mercy on our souls.

Harlem Shake - the Gangnam Style for people who thought what we really needed was another Gangnam Style - is currently sitting at the top of the Billboard Charts, in large part because YouTube streaming plays have started to count towards US chart positions.

It used to take a bunch of sales to get to number one. Now, you just need to have a bunch of people clicking on a Twitter link.

Revenue stream

Here's an interesting statistic - although there's more-or-less acceptance that streaming royalties aren't massive, they still account for 22% of revenue at Beggars Group.

Also interesting: Cooking Vinyl's Richard Leach expects YouTube to become the label's most significant source of revenue.

Billboard has found the missing views... mostly

So, those billions of views which the majors lost on YouTube? Billboard thinks it can account for them:

The company recently decided to remove view counts for videos that are no longer live on the channel, or so-called "dead videos." For Universal and Sony, that meant thousands of music videos that over the past three years slowly have migrated to the VEVO channel, which is jointly owned by the two companies. A senior label executive confirmed the migration.

In a strategic move, Universal, Sony and EMI in 2009 jointly put their music videos in the VEVO basket with the belief that by aggregating the videos, they could command better advertising rates as well as grow viewership.

That meant high-profile videos that once lived separately on the Universal and Sony YouTube channels have been relocated to Vevo. As a result, the views that those videos received during their time on the dedicated label channels were taken away in YouTube's latest "clean up" effort.

In other words, those views happened; they weren't "faked" or even double counted when they went on to Vevo. But because the videos are no longer on the channel, YouTube considers them "dead videos." They still live on in YouTube, just under a different channel.

Aha - so the major labels are in the clear. This is merely tidying away the views for videos which are no longer visible, right?

Mostly.

As Billboard admits earlier in its piece:

A YouTube spokesman confirmed that the company routinely adjusts their view counts in two ways. The first is by " de-spamming" the data, which takes out things like videos that automatically play without intervention from the viewer or pop-under videos that viewers may not actually see.

In the latest "de-spam," YouTube subtracted 1.5 million views from Sony and Universal's channels.

Notice how "de-spamming" is given quotes, as if it - hee hee - hardly counts as spamming at all. And lest anybody wish to spend more time thinking about what happened to cause these dubious spam views, Billboard plays that figure down further:

That may sound like a lot, but it's just a fraction of the 1.3 billion it subtracted throughout its entire video library.

See? Nothing to see here... move along, everyone.

Except 1.5million doesn't just sound like a lot, it is a lot. Yes, compared with the figure for all the videos on the site, it's small - and compared to the larger number of views which apparently were taken down for videos now on Vevo, it's small. But 1.5million is still rather a lot, and not the sort of thing reputable companies should be doing.

Indeed, were it another two companies with that many of dodgy views - companies not in partnership with YouTube, for example - it'd be surprising if Google allowed them to remain on the site.

But, of course, Billboard isn't going to bother about that question.

Record labels lose odd-smelling YouTube views

YouTube have been tidying up view figures, removing dubious counts.

Who has been especially hit by this purge o'views?

Why, record labels. The Daily Dot reports:

Universal's channel is the one that took the biggest hit. According to figures compiled by the YouTube statistics analysts at SocialBlade, the record company's YouTube channel lost more than 1 billion views from its preexisting tally of 7 billion views Tuesday.

Sony/BMG was the second largest sufferer, dropping more than 850 million views in one day, bringing its total number of views to a mere 2.3 million. RCA, which got off scot free by comparison, dipped 159 million views. Its tally now sits more modestly at 120 million views.

Of course, there's no evidence of wrong-doing, and Google is known for its caprice in how it handles, well, everything.

But it does look as if, once again, the labels haven't quite been living up to the virtues they expect the rest of us to achieve.

[UPDATE: Billboard thinks it can account for nearly all the lost views. The "nearly" is significant]

See You,Tube: Apple dump YouTube from iOS

Thoughtful bit over on Hypebot about Apple's decision to not renew its deal with YouTube to have a baked-in app on iPhones and iPads the moment you've finished making the unboxing video.

There's a slightly cloudy view about if this means people will start to create ad hoc HTML5 apps using Safari bookmarks (at a guess: nope) but this is the key bit:

When I shot this concert footage of my brother’s band, my iPhone encouraged me to upload that video to YouTube, as it still does today. In iOS 6, Apple’s default video destination of uploads will be Vimeo instead, as Mashable points out.

Have you been to a concert lately? There are a lot of iPhones there, many of them shooting audio and video footage. It won’t happen overnight, but gradually, Vimeo will replace YouTube as the place to see concert videos uploaded from iPhones.

It might not tip the balance in Vimeo's favour, but it's certainly going to strengthen Vimeo's position. You do wonder, though, if IAC has thought through what becoming the default location for all that iOS video might mean for its systems.

The Stone Roses: Or something a bit like them

Normally, there's nothing worse than being at a gig surrounded by people bellowing along. I've paid money to hear the singer, not you lot. Shut up.

Mind you, if I'd been at Heaton Park...

I think I'd have been begging the crowd to try and drown this out.

We warned you this would happen.

Over on the YouTube page for this video, stalwart Stone Roses fans - and by "stalwart" I mean 'people who were prepared to pay through the nose to see the band, but didn't know well enough or care enough to try and keep their memories safe' - are trying to argue that this, somehow, doesn't matter.

One line is to dismiss the technology - somehow, the music is recorded tolerably well but those new-fangled microphones will pick up an angel's voice, and make it sound like a wounded bear bellowing in the IKEA warehouse.

The other is to admit that, yes, it sounded dreadful, but that doesn't matter, because Ian Brown could never sing, you're paying for the performance.

Obviously, people who have splashed out a couple of hundred quid shlepping off the Heaton Park are going to try and find a way to justify to themselves what they've done; that's their right. It's almost heartbreakingly brave.

But, come on: what made The Stone Roses was the first album. It was the songs. The performance was a small plastic circle rotating as a little needle pulled across the work of John Leckie and, to a lesser extent, John Squire.

Still, if you take them at their word: where's the performance, then? Brown is tramping about the stage like someone waiting for Wildlife Services to remove an injured bear from IKEA, because he needs to pop in and buy some shelves. His performance consists of turning up in some jeans and singing badly.

Of course you had a great night. Let's just not pretend you were at a great gig.

Google plans to sue conversion site

Google is going to sue YouTube-mp3.org, according to a letter sent to the site's owner.

As the name implies, the service takes a YouTube URL and spits out an mp3 of the audio track. Given that it's sort-of-copyright-infringey (although not of any copyright Google itself owns, for the vast majority of the videos).

As an extra protection, Google has started blocking the YouTube-mp3 servers, which it could have done quietly without drawing attention to the site and the wide range of similar options.

Torrentfreak suggests similar conversion tools are getting letters from Google; but Google surely knows all it means is people will go back to ripping the audio from videos the old-fashioned way, capturing it locally as the music plays out.

German court might just make YouTube, internet unworkable

GEMA, the German rights organisation, has won a significant victory in a case against Google.

In short, the German courts have decided that YouTube is responsible for the content posted on its site, not the individual posting videos, and as such should be paying royalties for any music that winds up there.

BBC News explains what the ruling means:

If enforced, the ruling could also slow the rate at which video is posted to the site as any music clip would have to be cleared for copyright before being used.

With sixty hours of new video hitting the servers every sixty seconds, the "slow the rate" here would mean, in effect, stop video being pushed to YouTube.

It's a silly move for GEMA to seek this sort of judgement, as it won't stop the content being posted online - their pyrrhic victory over Rapidshare shows how all they do is scatter the content - and backs into a corner an organisation which is sort-of-trying to do the right thing.

The obvious move would be for YouTube to just bow out of Germany. And who, exactly, would be better off as a result of that?

I'll bet Pinterest were watching this judgement with, erm, interest.