Negotiations on a new deal for YouTube UK to continue to show certain music videos have broken down with the Performing Rights Society, who collect license fees for public ‘performances’ of music (including radio, TV etc) and dish them out to musicians.

Interesting to compare the PRS statement and YouTube blog post on why this has happened.

PRS:

PRS for Music is outraged on behalf of consumers and songwriters that Google has chosen to close down access to music videos on YouTube in the UK.

Google has told us they are taking this step because they wish to pay significantly less than at present to the writers of the music on which their service relies, despite the massive increase in YouTube viewing.

…

Google had revenues of $5.7bn in the last quarter of 2008.

Google sorry, YouTube:

Our previous licence from PRS for Music has expired, and we’ve been unable so far to come to an agreement to renew it on terms that are economically sustainable for us.

There are two obstacles in these negotiations: prohibitive licensing fees and lack of transparency.

We value the creativity of musicians and songwriters and have worked hard with rights-holders to generate significant online revenue for them and to respect copyright. But PRS is now asking us to pay many, many times more for our licence than before.

So which is it – are PRS charging more, or Google/ YouTube trying to pay less? This is starting to look like the kind of divisive positioning which music fans – and musicians – have been suffering for so long. Each party claiming to be on the side of music lovers and casting the other as the bad guys.

Fans have become accustomed to Music Industry mistrust of New Media, and cast the PRS in the ‘Man’ role (see the comments in the YouTube post). Meanwhile like a couple of others I can’t help wondering who is really the David, and who the Goliath here.

What do you think?

Lots of interesting developments in there (particularly in terms of DRM and the migration to an AIR based platform) but one that caught my eye was about the social aspects of viewing:

Rating works really well in YouTube where you’ve got a million videos. In iPlayer, if you rate Parliament channel as zero stars, are you saying that Parliament is rubbish, or that you just don’t want to watch Parliament? Rating in the context of the BBC is very useful, but only when you’ve got a friends network.

It’ll be interesting to see whether small networks of friends will take to what amounts to yet another social network, albeit based around a huge brand like iPlayer.

My feeling is that the conversation will take place better on other platforms that are set up for peer-to-peer communication as they do at the moment: down the pub and on Twitter.

I’m pleased to say that the long awaited UK Premiere is tomorrow, on BBC Two, Friday 4th July at 23.35hrs.

As far as I’m aware I’m credited as Production Assistant, which entailed helping to get all the parties together. This year my work has started to develop – I’ve been developing my own ideas for shows, starting to pitch them to broadcasters and developing partnerships with other organisations.

And of course one of the exciting areas I’m working in is where collaboration and the culture of the web can meet and cross-fertilise with some of the qualities that long-form film and broadcast bring to the table. Qualities which I hope are evident in our film on Jay-Z.. Let me know in the comments box!

I’ll update this post when I know its URL Sorry to say, this won’t be on BBC’s iPlayer but is available on DVD if you would like to see it.

Tags: Jay-Z, Hip-Hop, Lyrics, Beats, TV, Classic Albums

I’m currently watching a simulcast of the England football friendly against the USA: John Terry has scored, and despite the low resolution which makes it look a little like a football sim game, I’m enjoying the experience. In fact, I’m really pleased for him after a painful final against Manchester United!

Let me be clear; I pay the license fee with pride as I have come to greatly value the BBC‘s contribution to society (and they commission some of our films), but the convenience and portability of an app like this make it much easier to keep in touch with the key programmes currently showing. I’ve been using the BBC’s iPlayer a lot since its launch on Christmas day 2007, and that is great for catching up, but Zattoo just might put some of the live and shared experience back into telly for me, and particularly as my USB card seems to have ceased working. This works, and well.

It is said that the business model is somewhat unstable, as essentially Zattoo is rebroadcasting channel‘s output over IP; they may not get away with it for long – or may have to charge subscriptions in order to make financial arrangements with the broadcasters. The commercials, the idents are also streamed, and the application doesn’t facilitate downloading or time shifting, so you’d have to ask, apart from a loss of control, what’s for the broadcasters not to like?

Tags: Zattoo, Football, Simulcast, Application

This morning I attended a gathering of the great and the good, and listened to three very interesting New Media pioneers speak about possible futures, courtesy of Policy Unplugged: Kevin Anderson, Blogs Editor of The Guardian, Jeremy Ettinghausen, Head of Digital Publishing at Penguin books, and Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor for Education for Channel 4. It all happened at a rather fun and progressive feeling members club, and coffee and croissants were in abundance, so I was happy.

Jeremy kicked off by asking, when everyone is a publisher, where are the editors? I’m sure Clay Shirky would have something to say about that!

He whet our appetite by declaring that he would be ‘very surprised if there wasn’t a major consumer electronics company releasing an eBook this year’ – something he has wanted to believe since 2001, but without actually telling us anything of a sensitive nature, he thinks this year it will happen.

Wheras 10,000 people bought the Rocket ten years ago, and sales stopped there, the question is, is there now a mass market potential for an eBook? How much are people going to pay for a book so that Penguin can support the development of new work? DRM is a non-issue if the user experience is a happy one, people will pay for it (witness the phenomenal success of iTunes)

Beyond finding a business model that will work for publishing however, where the internet has changed things is in our reading habits. Where movable type gave rise to a linear experience of reading – and mode of thinking – he cited evidence that shows hypertext has given rise to a centre-out way of scanning webpages, and suggested that this may have had a corresponding effect on the way we think.

Ultimately, publishers must begin to see themselves as distributors of ideas, rather than books. Storytellers will win, but win what? Asked about audiobooks, Jeremy outlined his vision of the integrated book, where you can go from a paper-like eBook experience, to a car journey (where the audiobook picks up where you left off), to the laptop where you can carry on reading from the screen. A few years off perhaps, but a compelling vision for the industry; and more importantly, the consumer.

Kevin Anderson picked up and riffed on the familiar theme of the Death of Newspapers, stating his aim thus: ‘To take the tools that are disrupting the industry, and applying them to our journalism’

Other sources of journalistic content have turned the old business model on it’s head by making full use of new, and open source technologies, slashing costs in the process. When the cost of experimentation (and potential failure) is so low, it’s possible to ‘fail forward’ – let the successful experimentation pay for the failures.

The Guardian group has experience confirming customer loyalty: Kevin cites the Observer Music Monthly and Observer Food Monthly as examples of journalism which attracts a dedicated and committed community – and which can then presumably feed an advertiser funded business model.

Kevin’s media equation of paper = passive wheras online = active may be a little simplistic, but in the new models, it’s undoubtedly community and connectability which is the name of the game. How else are you going to inspire loyalty from your audience in an age of such varied choice?

Matt Locke has made a name moving Channel 4′s six-million pound education budget off the television online, with the aim of utilising the spaces where his target audience hang out, sites such as YouTube and Bebo, as the medium for his slate.

With an abiding interest in futurology, Matt amusingly prefaced his talk with the suggestion that if you ask a bunch of thirtysomething geeks to discuss ‘What’s next?’, you’ll doubtless hear of futures in which geeks have really cool jobs.

Citing Gilbert Scott’s telephone box as a classic consensual architecture of the Private, he notes that the first device that really dissolved the old world division of private and public was the mobile phone. Now public and private are navigated – somewhat awkwardly so far – by body language (that look which says ‘I may be walking down the street, but I’m having a private conversation!’), and interventions such as that odd yellow crosshair you find in front of cash machines, and which people will walk around even if no-one is using the machine!

The Private and Public are rapidly eroding, if they’re not already over: they have been replaced by the Personal and the Social. Spaces on the internet often find themselves somewhere in between the two; witness blogs, which are often written with friends of the author in mind; Facebook, where the dividing line is particularly mysterious; and MSN (a popular chat client), where young people have been seen to develop complex and subtle gradations of contacts (eg. ‘friends’, ‘family’, ‘bitches’, ‘wankers’, ‘possible future boyfriends’, etc.), reflecting their developed awareness of their selves in the social web.

Matt suggests that the great contribution of such spaces is not choice (young people think nostalgically of a time where there were only four channels), but voice. Many of his young audience cannot imagine a time where one had to have permission to speak in a public realm (eg. by writing to a newspaper).

So the technologies that will take hold will be, like the text message, MSN or (potentially) Twitter, above all playful, and vernacular. Whilst in any social space, real or virtual, there will be problems (eg. bullying or just simple embarrassment), new technology will take hold not by dictating communication, but by facilitating it.

Tags: NewMedia, Future, Social, Sum-up