If anyone didn’t notice, You Tube videos are not exactly high quality. Its not like someone is satisfied watching a low quality video and just be happy with that alone.

Fans go to watch the videos of their favorite groups and do purchase CDs and/or legal digital downloads and attend the concerts. Videos promote and create additional buzz for the artists and are not considered as a revenue stream of by itself.

Yanking videos off a You Tube hurts the fans and ultimately the artists themselves as they lose a key (and free source) of exposure.

Its not like the “old days” you could just dial up MTV and watch videos non stop. In fact there are no longer any mainstream 24 hour music video channels on satellite/cable anymore.

You Tube in many ways has started to become what MTV was 25 years ago, except it is now interactive with fans getting to choose what music videos they want to watch.

And since the videos have a watch count, the artist and the record label gets to see how many people watched that video.

I watched “In the Ayer” by Flo Rida on You Tube. That song alone had a seven million watch count. 7 million potential customers…what company would not want that? ( I think we know the answer to that one…)

You hear a cool song on the radio, you want your friends to hear it too. There is a video of the song, you email or text your friends with the link and they get to see and watch it too. (Its called word of mouth advertising…something that the music industry seemingly has no clue about).

Again, a lack of foresight by some in the industry ends up ultimately hurting themselves in the long run…

Sort of what happened to Metallica when they sued Napster. Instead of coming up with creative solutions like selling their content online or making deals with Napster….they ended up dissing their fan base in the process…which some believe they haven’t recovered from.

I guess history repeats itself….