Nearly everyone has clicked a link to a video and found that the video was removed or the audio muted, so you should know what I'm talking about. Record companies, such as WMG, force YouTube to remove videos uploaded with songs by their artists. Often this is because they have the video posted on their own page and prefer it be viewed there, so they'll get money from YouTube. There are several things wrong with this. I have experienced several times where I was looking for a song and the artist doesn't have a YouTube channel or the song isn't posted. Eventually I find one audio-only copy and there is nothing but thanks in the comments for finally posting that song. This is great, but more often than not I'm too late and the audio is muted or the video is completely gone. If these record companies are too lazy to upload a song sought after by so many users, they why are you punishing someone for doing you the favour of uploading it for you? At least do us the courtesy of uploading the song on your channel, you already know by the millions of views that people want to hear that song. Do you not want whatever amount of money that would make you on YouTube?
I will agree that the videos that post the song along with a link to a free download had legitimate reasons for being removed. But I myself was once banned for the one time occurrence of posting songs from a Muse album that had been released. I had purchased the album on its release day and posted the songs for people to hear who hadn't bought it or in areas that it was still unreleased. I asked through annotations what people thought of the album and I had my inbox flooded with comments saying they couldn't wait to pick up the album. These songs were not online at the time and as a fan of the band I was helping to spread their music to the world. Apparently, record companies hate free advertising and banned my account (even though you supposedly have 3 strikes). Further to the point of free advertising, once record companies do upload their songs or music videos, most disable embedding. Okay, so you're completed against someone else uploading a video for you, I can be fine with that. But now you've uploaded the song and to help share this song and support the artist, hundreds of people would like to embed the video on their blogs, personal websites, profiles on whatever social network, etc. What reason could you have for this? Almost every embedded video I watch, I end up following back to the original page on YouTube. Even if I don't try to do this, the normal clicking the video to pause instead links to the video page. For greedy companies they are for some unknown reason against others helping them make money. YouTube needs to put record companies in their place. Fair use under United States law says it is not infringement to use a works for comment or criticism. At least all the videos I posted had questions asking what people thought and had discussions in the comments. I was not making any commercial gains from uploading these videos and only helped increase the potential market value (maybe even only by one album sale). I don't know what record companies' problem is. The internet is well established and people already download music, so if they're not going to make there music easily available, everyone will just download it. Why waste $20 on an album or the few dollars on iTunes for a song when I can download and try the songs risk free? Turns out the album sucks, just delete it knowing you didn't get suckered into paying money to find that out.
I think I've complained long enough, just search WMG on YouTube. There is an abundance of video expressing their distaste for the situation out there.
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