Is YouTube's Partner Program good for musicians, or bad?
The final Tabs of the week are all about YouTube, music in the public domain, and a major label’s search for a buyer.
- But first, copyright stuff. Professor (and Friend of Tunecore) George Howard has a post up at Tunecorner about the public domain. Like his longtime friend Jeff Price, Howard is very good at finding the meat and guts of dry topics, and this is actually quite useful for you.
- Eliot Van Buskirk explores whether YouTube is bad for music, and as usual, we agree with almost every point he makes. As great as YouTube is as a promotional vehicle, its dominance makes it almost impossible for artists to make a living off the sale of their recordings. And given the fact that a doubling in revenue in 2010 hasn’t made YouTube profitable, it’s unlikely that it’s going to up its royalty rates any time soon.
- Just as Jason Feinberg predicted, the possibility of a major label shakeup is growing. Apparently Warner head Edgar Bronfman, Jr is looking to do one of two things: either buy EMI from Citigroup, or sell bits and pieces of WMG off to someone else. We have trouble seeing the logic in combining these two labels (twice the size = twice the losses?), but hey: these guys are CEOs. They must be really smart.
