Yesterday I saw a few articles reporting that YouTube will be blocking indie musicians’ videos if they do not agree to the terms of YouTube’s new music streaming service. The “sign this or else” strategy they’re using is stupid and foolish if they expect to remain the top player for online video and they should rethink this strategy. No one likes an asshole and YouTube is being an asshole.

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*Update 6/27* – It doesn’t look like YouTube will actually be removing artist’s videos from the site if they refuse to sign up for the music service, YouTube might just take away the ability for those videos to be monetized. This isn’t that big of a deal because artists still have the opportunity to insert their own ads directly in the video or get creative with product placements and the like.  We’ll see what happens.    

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I can’t say I blame the indie labels and musicians who refuse to agree to YouTube’s music streaming terms. YouTube made agreements with the huge record labels for higher royalties on music licensing than what they are offering the indie labels. By doing this, YouTube is dragging themselves into a dying industry. There’s been a shift thanks to the Internet and there’s no longer a need for large record companies. The future of music belongs to independent labels and musicians and for YouTube to make special deals with large record labels shows that they are only interested in keeping the executives of these labels happy and are not concerned with experience of their end users.

This is not the only issue with their actions. I have an even bigger problem when they say that they will block the videos for independent musicians if they refuse to sign up for the music service. Now, I have no problem with music streaming services. I think they’re great and I love the fact that they make music available to everyone extremely easily. However, I also like the fact that if a musician doesn’t want to be apart of that, they don’t have to. We have a choice to be on these services or not. YouTube is taking away that choice and holding music videos hostage. It blows my mind that they would be so stupid to treat their content creators this way.

I use CD Baby as a digital distributer to music streaming services and I asked them yesterday if they were going to join the YouTube music streaming service and they excitedly said they would. CD Baby isn’t really one to wheel and deal for the best royalty terms, they always seem mainly concerned with making the service available to the musicians who want it. Which is cool. I wouldn’t be on all the digital retail outlets and streaming services without them. I also asked if it would be possible to opt out of YouTube’s music streaming service once they reached an agreement and they said that yes it will be possible to opt out.

I’ve opted out of CD Baby services before. The Rumblefish service that allows for royalties to come through on YouTube videos that use my music constantly reported my own music videos to YouTube’s Content ID. So I would get copyright notices on my own songs. It’s not very well thought out so I opted out of it and I’ll have to do the same thing with YouTube’s music streaming service unless they decide to take back their idiotic threats.

I’m sure Vimeo and other video sites won’t mind the extra traffic to videos hosted on their sites. Since YouTube doesn’t care about indie musicians video content, I’ll be getting my YouTube videos ready to move to a different site.

I’m not gonna tell you not to use YouTube. There are tons of videos there and its really easy to use. I just want to give you the news about their stupid moves and that you probably won’t be able to find any of my videos there next week unless they change their mind.

YouTube is being an asshole. Plain and simple.