Lately I've been noticing that a lot of YouTube clips that friends or bloggers post on their webpages have been showing up "Embedding disabled by request," when you click on them. Some people will then proceed to YouTube to watch the clip on their page. Many, like me, will shrug and move on.
This phenomenon is second only to the more annoying problem we've all encountered at some point: videos yanked from YouTube entirely due to copyright infringement. Now, I know some intellectual property law, so, yes, I "get it." The owner wants royalties, advertisers can lose revenue, yadda yadda... But, in the case of fresh talent, keeping the fans from the goods can be a serious hindrance.
We are an impatient generation. If we click on a link once and the video is gone, not a lot of people are going to expend much more effort looking for that video. Think about that: that's one more potential fan lost, one more potential record unsold, one more potential concert attendee shunned. YouTube is saturated, after all. Seconds later that lost potential fan will be searching for snuggly Italian Greyhounds.
Exposure is important for all artists but especially emerging ones. Methinks sometimes the record companies are too busy thinking about royalties when they should be focusing on casting a wider net by actually allowing their artists to be promoted.
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Paul, I cannot tell you how frustrating this is! Sometimes, i click on a link because it happens to be there. Like you, I usually will not go youtube to see the clip unless i REALLY want to see it.
ReplyDeleteThere has to be good reasoning behind this, but it does seem to be quite anti-productive.