Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ok Go on Why Labels Won't Let You Embed YouTube Videos

okgo.forumsunlimited.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–37 of 37 posts

Re: Ok Go on Why Labels Won't Let You Embed YouTube Videos

#31

Post by duskwuff »

jroes wrote: post #4

is it possible to do some kind of javascript/iframe hackery to make embedding work?

I've seen some weird hacks that sort of get you embedding of embed-disabled videos, but they're incredibly fragile, and tend to break whenever YouTube makes any change to their layout.

Re: Ok Go on Why Labels Won't Let You Embed YouTube Videos

#33

Post by geedee77 »

josefresco wrote: post #9

Question: Does MTV pay the record labels for showing their videos? I'm not being a smart-ass, I'm really asking and didn't want to rip into this without having some background.\ The article says that they used to consider MTV a promotional partner, do they still?

I don't know for certain if MTV have any special deals with the music companies (I did used to work for EMI but not in royalties) but everyone who plays music public needs to pay for it. This includes radio and TV stations.

I think the point probably is that music videos tended to be given away as freebies (although public playing of them would still incur a royalty payment) but now the music video is seen as part of the sellable product. I was actually part of the team that helped implement the technology part of this at EMI some years ago.

Re: Ok Go on Why Labels Won't Let You Embed YouTube Videos

#34

Post by discolemonade »

ramidarigaz wrote: post #30
discolemonade wrote: post #29

It's extremely difficult to feel sorry for the record labels. They all deserve their fate. They saw everything coming as far back as the mid 90s, but decided they were more powerful than the market. With all their CD boom money, they could have bought Napster and Big Champagne, which tracks P2P file sharing. They could have bought MySpace and Pandora and just about any major music portal that any person of average in…

I agree with you. I don't feel sorry for the record labels. I do however feel sorry for the artists. They're the ones getting screwed while the labels hold on to their dying industry for dear life.

The artists are actually doing just fine. They've always wanted to free themselves from the labels. If you're an artist and you can figure out distribution and marketing on your own, all you need is about 1000 loyal fans to make a decent living because you keep most of your profits. It's not as easy as it sounds, but at least it's freedom and what's more important than that?

Re: Ok Go on Why Labels Won't Let You Embed YouTube Videos

#35

Post by discolemonade »

wendroid wrote: post #5

FTFA "So the money that used to flow through the music business has slowed to a trickle" I'd like to call that a "mis-speak" "The digital music business internationally saw a sixth year of expansion in 2008, growing by an estimated 25 per cent to US$3.7 billion in trade value. Digital platforms now account for around 20 per cent of recorded music sales." [1] Which makes music sales of US$18 billion for 2008 by contra…

Yeah, but digital sales aren't replacing CD sales. They probably never will. That wouldn't be so much of a problem if the labels didn't mind becoming smaller entities. The thing they haven't yet realized is that the industry is breaking up into many different niche entities of which they're now only a small part. It sucks losing power they way they have but complaining that the digital music revolution is unfair is like saying that gravity is unfair.It's a non-starter.

Re: Ok Go on Why Labels Won't Let You Embed YouTube Videos

#36

Post by jsm386 »

krakensden wrote: post #25
danhak wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't really answer the original question, in which I am also interested. What about MTV2, Fuse, BET, VH1, etc? Do TV networks have to pay royalties on music videos?

MTV2 doesn't play much music videos either- for that matter, neither does BET or VH1.

Still, I also would like to know the answer to the original question. Surely videos are still played somewhere. Do labels get paid when that happens?
Post reply on HN