Pete Waterman, known to dozens around the world as the co-author of “Never Gonna Give You Up”, is really pissed off. It turns out that even though the video has been played millions and millions of times online, Waterman’s only made about 16 bucks from YouTube royalties – you know, enough to buy a couple CD’s worth of good music. Although Astley himself has kinda rolled with the punches in a “Gee, I guess it’s nice not to be totally forgotten about” sort of way, Waterman is outraged that he hasn’t been made an overnight millionaire or anything.
Looks like Pete’s main problem is not knowing how the Internet works. If you’re smart enough to punch in our URL (you genius you), you already know that 99.99% of traffic to that video was via RickRoll. You know, that thing where we pretend to link you to something cool and then smash you with a purposely annoying song? We aren’t talking about getting a couple of nickels every time your song is played on a cheesy 80’s station or anything. I’d say he probably HAS benefited materially from the visibility of those videos, and any bitching about exploitation needs to be directed at his label and not YouTube.
In other record label YouTube news, I stumbled upon this story while visiting other enjoyable sites – Universal’s made a partnership with YouTube to synergize cross media paradigms or something like that. It looks like YouTube makes a killing off of this one, just by virtue of knowing the habits of their viewers. Most of the time you seek out a song on YouTube, it’s to pass a quick sample of something to a friend – and they understand that whatever’s actually on the screen videowise (usually a cutscene from Kingdom Hearts, I’m pretty sure Kingdom Hearts has been set to every song in the history of recorded music somewhere on YouTube) is pretty irrelevant. If Vevo (which absolutely should not be confused with Bebo or Meebo) is hoping to make waves by being the Exclusive Online Home For Official Universal Records Videos featuring such classic, high definition images as… the band playing their songs and looking into the camera – then they’ve made a huge mistake. They’ve really approached their business from the same perspective as an aging radio-centric songwriter from the 1980’s. Which is disappointing, because these guys are supposed to know all the rules, right?
Tags: Commentary, YouTube
All interesting bits to consider- and by god, you are absolutely right about the Kingdom Hearts cutscene sequences being matched up with just about ANY song. I must say that I often arrive at Youtube seeking out an actual-footage music performance to watch, however, along with grabbing links to show others.
And as you wrote that, I was making my latest post, highlighting the best of the Kingdom Hearts videos.