YouTube Will 'Frustrate' Some Users With Ads So They Pay for Music (bloomberg.com) 191
YouTube will increase the number of ads that some users see between music videos, part of a strategy to convince more of its billion-plus viewers to pay for a forthcoming subscription music service from the Google-owned video site. Bloomberg: People who treat YouTube like a music service, those passively listening for long periods of time, will encounter more ads, according to Lyor Cohen, the company's global head of music. "You're not going to be happy after you are jamming 'Stairway to Heaven' and you get an ad right after that," Cohen said in an interview at the South by Southwest music festival. Cohen is trying to prove that YouTube is committed to making people pay for music and silence the "noise" about his company's purported harm to the recording industry. The labels companies have long criticized YouTube for hosting videos that violate copyrights, and not paying artists and record companies enough.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:and the logical followup (Score:4, Interesting)
if DRM has taught us anything its that aggravating someone is the worst way to get them to participate in a market.
Well, to be fair, the argument against DRM had to do with the fact that it affects users who have already directly paid for the content. People streaming on Youtube haven't paid for the content, and thus must pay with some other means.
Youtube streaming is largely for convenience of getting to a single song easily; whether it would result in users paying for the tracks, paying for Spotify Premium or similar, or 'doing without' would accomplish the labels' goals...but the bigger concern I have is whether we'll see a renaissance in a Limewire-like service, which helps no one.
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Youtube streaming is largely for convenience of getting to a single song easily; whether it would result in users paying for the tracks...
That's what I go there for. Heard Limp Biskit's 'Behind Blue Eyes' on the way home yesterday and had to hear The Who when I got home. If Youtube ceases to be a convenient way to listen to indiviual songs, I'l pony up the extra $5/mo to upgrade from Pandora Plus to Premium.
...but the bigger concern I have is whether we'll see a renaissance in a Limewire-like service, which helps no one.
If it helps no one, it won't come back. Limewire helped me a bunch back when I was a user.
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if DRM has taught us anything its that aggravating someone is the worst way to get them to participate in a market.
Well, to be fair, the argument against DRM had to do with the fact that it affects users who have already directly paid for the content. People streaming on Youtube haven't paid for the content, and thus must pay with some other means.
Youtube streaming is largely for convenience of getting to a single song easily; whether it would result in users paying for the tracks, paying for Spotify Premium or similar, or 'doing without' would accomplish the labels' goals...but the bigger concern I have is whether we'll see a renaissance in a Limewire-like service, which helps no one.
Use a radio streamer service, available in any decent Linux distro. Lots of non-stop music of all kinds.
You don't know how to read, do you?
Youtube is for finding the single song that you want right now easily. Non-stop streaming is radio, whether curated or random.
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Furthermore, if there was an incident of malware which could be traced back to ads on Youtube, there would be a change to prevent such ads in the future. Interactive streaming ads are a relatively new and niche medium at the moment
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1. Just as Adblockers will become more adept, companies are more adept at working around them.
2. DRM made it possible for large labels to actually post their media on such streaming services. Companies are protective of their IP, and are not apt to let it flow free. DRM allowed people to have access to the music, with good enough protections.
3. Do you have any data that the artist will make more money from donations vs royalty payments? Also will you continue to pay the artist for your favorite song over th
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Also will you continue to pay the artist for your favorite song over the next 20 years?
Why should I pay for a song more than once? Royalties continue over years because the streaming service / radio station has to pay for each use. Are you saying people shouldn't be able to play a song they bought over and over? That won't fly.
Or will that one song that you loved so much be the end of that artist. Because after getting paid for that song, they will no longer have an income because their other songs are not so popular.
Why should I pay someone for songs I hate and will never listen to voluntarily?
Also will you be paying for all the artists you enjoy? Or just a few of your favorites?
It's my wallet, isn't it? Each payment is my decision; if I decide not to pay and thereby go without some music that I might have enjoyed, that's my decision to make.
The good old days... (Score:4, Insightful)
How on earth did artists ever survive back in the days when you just paid them once for a record/tape/CD that you could play over and over for the next 20 years without paying them again? Especially when the studio/distributor/retailers took the lion's share of that money?
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How on earth did artists ever survive back in the days when you just paid them once for a record/tape/CD that you could play over and over for the next 20 years without paying them again? Especially when the studio/distributor/retailers took the lion's share of that money?
There were essentially no such days. Composers made money from published book royalties long before sound recording. Performers made money by performing. The first recorded performances from the 1890s onward were nominally protected by the same copyright laws, but they were poorly enforced; ASCAP started in 1914. Radio royalties started almost as soon as music started being transmitted.
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Radio broadcast royalties
Touring
Merchandising
The big names would be able to make a lot of money off of all three. And add media sales as a bonus.
However other artists may only have a few options. They may not be good at Touring, but have a popular song on the radio.
The problem is Radio (with the iHeart Media Bankruptcy) isn't as valuable as it use to be. And Artists need to switch to internet media vs Radio. If we download a song then that should be a single use license to play as much as we like, but if i
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> 3. Do you have any data that the artist will make
> more money from donations vs royalty payments?
It's not "data", per se. But take your pick of Steve Albini or Courtney Love, depending on how old you are, and read either of their essays about music industry royalties and the accounting shenanigans behind them. The tl;dr of it is that the royalties payments for the music are, and always have been, peanuts. And the internet did nothing to change that. If you go to their concert, and buy a $2 vinyl s
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A looooong time ago, They Might Be Giants did a Slashdot interview... And someone asked if it was better to buy the CD or to download the album off of whatever platform it was on at the time.
They responded that they wanted people to buy the actual CD because they got paid 80 cents if you bought the CD, but only 10 cents if you bought the downloaded album.
Why there was such a big royalty difference--especially when the download cost the customer about the same as
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I would be fairly surprised if they're getting $0.80 per CD; unless perhaps it's at the merchandise table at one of their concerts. But even so, when purchased in bulk, that $2 sticker I mentioned costs somewhere between $0.05 and $0.25 to print, depending on the size of the run, it's dimensions, and how many colors of ink the design needs. So that $1.75-$1.95 still works out better than a $0.80 CD sale. And if the $0.10 figure is more accurate, then the sticker give the band more money than their entire
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Used music stores are great for low cost CDs you can rip, put away, and often never touch again unless you need to re-rip for whatever reason
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Since when are artists getting royalties from their stuff being played over any media? (radio or youtube) Last I heard, ASCAP collects the money and labels get some of it, but artists are still waiting for that first royalty check.
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>> That would make ad blocking virtually impossible.
Nope.
That would make Youtube non-useable.
OR
That would lead to innovation in the adblocking technology.
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Um, what subscriptions? EvilSS is suggesting that *nonsubscribers" might receive injected ads.
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On my PC, adblock completely blocks any and all youtube ads already. However on my Roku watching youtube on a larger tv, I don't have a good solution. I added some blacklists to my router but it's not so effective. So one of these days I'll find a better blacklist.
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If you use only Youtube with your TV, use a whitelist instead.
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This is the ongoing cat-and-mouse game that Youtube plays with video downloaders. Just like virus/anti-virus one-upmanship, one side improves their tools, then the other must compensate with new and better tools on their side.
Wait a week and try the latest version of the video downloader tool once they update it.
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could also just use audacity and record the audio that way.
It's tedious, and you have to copy in real time -- but here we are.
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>> Seriously, just get YouTube Red and call it a day.
Nope.
Re: Brave Browser (Score:2)
Fuck monetization.
Ads on YouTube? (Score:5, Funny)
Advertising on YouTube is a really terrible idea. I hope they never decide to put ads on it. That would ruin the site.
Re:Ads on YouTube? (Score:4)
Google Music used to have so many ads that it was unusable. They even ran ads saying "Don't like the ads! Subscribe for advertisement free music!". After I listened to that for a day, I deleted the app and did not try it again for two years. A few months ago I gave it try during an outage on another music service and the obnoxious ads were gone. So now I am using it again for background music. My new complaint -- the channel playlists are way, way too short before they endlessly repeat the same songs over and over. When you finish the playlist on a channel, why can't it just randomly play similar songs instead of looping the same playlist? Randomly playing songs has a very low royalty compared to on-demand.
The lesson here -- obnoxious ads work to drive your customers away. But they may be more likely to go to a competitor than your own pay service.
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You are purchasing plenty from Google -- you pay with your personal data.
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Nope.
A church has no such thing as "customers".
What you describe is probably not a church.
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I know what the first thing they will search for on YouTube is too.
https://www.youtube.com/result... [youtube.com]
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You joke, but ads on Pandora is what ruined the service for me. The worst ones are ads with music/sound qualities that are just completely different in character from the music I was listening to (like a loud car ad in the middle of a classical station).
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That's not the case.
A big chunk of the people today navigate the Internet ad-free. You should try.
And that's proven to be good for your mental health, for your bandwidth, and for your IT security.
Adgaurd and Adblock Plus (Score:1)
Say hello to my little ad removing friends. Haven't seen an ad on YouTube for quite awhile.
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"Say hello to my little ad removing friends. Haven't seen an ad on YouTube for quite awhile."
If you had read even the fucking summary you'd know that this is for music _listeners_ they will get audible ads.
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I'd say that parent post was correct, adblock and carry on.
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If you had understood the summary and anything at all about advertising and blocking then you wouldn't have made such a stupidly ridiculous post.
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No ads before videos, no ads afterwards, no audio ads, no video ads, no banners. None.
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You know there are adblockers that just remove the youtube ads completely right?
Alternative Sources (Score:3, Insightful)
Alternatively: YouTube to frustrate users to use a different source for their music.
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...use a different source for their music.
Bearshare is great, but Limewire's what the pros use.
I'm at the $5/mo Pandora level. Unlimited skips and no ads. I might have to pony up the extra $5 for premium so I can pick the song like I do on Youtube.
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Download them (Score:4, Insightful)
I download all youtube unless I am just wandering around on youtube checking out new stuff. I download about 20 things a day from youtube, typically to mp3 formate as I don't care about the video aspect. I do it all with a free downloader online. It works great and I can load them up on my phone and listen all day without one commercial.
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Yeah, I'm sure it's impossible for Google to do anything about that.
Light vs Sound (Score:1)
This continues to boggle me that people do this.
Don't they know that the sound quality is a lot worse.
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Most people don't give a rats ass about the sound quality. People have been listening to low bit rate MP3's for decades now. Most people are going to care about a few things when listening to music online; cost, convenience, and availability.
The cost for listening on youtube is free, or as close as you're likely to ever get.
The convenience is pretty good. When you find a video/song you like, it takes two clicks to add it to a playlist. There is a robust search feature to help you find anything you could eve
Can Anyone Explain (Score:1)
Why YouTube gets a free pass on copyright infringement? How much you want to bet if I hosted a bunch of copyrighted music videos other users uploaded on my site which i then monetized by ads i would be in jail right now? Let's call this service "The Pirate Tube".
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“Stairway to Heaven”? (Score:1)
What age group is YouTube after here, exactly? Are they trying to get a slice of that lucrative Social Security market?
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My guess is they're trying the market segment that cannot google "Youtube ad blocker".
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Weird strategy (Score:4, Interesting)
I've never understood this strategy, exactly. I mean, I know why Google/YouTube is doing it, but what's in it for the advertisers?
Flooding the system with ads that are specifically meant to drive people to ad-free subscriptions means you're removing all the people that have the money to pay for stuff AND who can't tolerate ignoring ads. What you're left with is either people that don't have the money, or are so good at ignoring ads they don't care.
(I know that ads work on a semi-conscious level; even someone that really claims not to be affected can't help but be to some extent. Still, I don't see it as a good value for advertisers.)
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I've never understood this strategy, exactly. I mean, I know why Google/YouTube is doing it, but what's in it for the advertisers?
It sounds like an admission by YouTube that the ads aren't generating enough revenue to pay the royalties.
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Re: Weird strategy (Score:2)
Shhhhhhhh! People are sleeping, you might wake them.
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That all pre-supposes that someone sticks around for the advertising at all. I actually put my phone or tablet down—sometimes face down—and mute it. Even with audio ads, I'd be willing to turn the volume off.
But yes, I agree with a lot of this. It still leaves a lot of people that are affected by advertising that are either unwilling or unable to pay for the product. If they had the money, they'd just buy their way out of seeing the ads at all.
Good tactic, bad strategy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good tactic, bad strategy? (Score:4, Interesting)
It won't. They might convince to pay for something. But they also convince me THEY don't get a penny of it.
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It's called "calculated misery" (Score:3)
You advertise something for free or low cost to get (in their case) eyeballs or the ability to legally say it costs some lowball price.
You really want to sell the upgraded version, but you can't take away the original offer without pissing off your customers and sometimes the FTC (bait and switch).
If your customers aren't going for the upsell, you just degrade the lowball product until they do.
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If your customers aren't going for the upsell, you just degrade the lowball product until they do.
Amazon Prime Shipping in a nutshell.
so does that mean (Score:2)
You may learn from the mistakes of others, ya know (Score:3)
Didn't you learn anything from webpages and what happened to their ad revenues when ads became more and more obnoxious? What did people do? Grin and bear it? Pay for the pages? Or install more and more sophisticated blockers for the nuisance?
The only thing that will happen is that people install adblockers. Worse, you'll get people who did NOT use adblockers so far to use them. The ones that are your key audience. The ones that don't want to deal with "that computer shit" and just want their fix. The ones that still put up with your ads. You have already lost the ones that do care and that do know how to use adblockers. I haven't seen an ad on YouTube in ages.
You are about to learn what the webpage ad industry learned: That you can actually make mountains move if you pester them enough. These are the people who put up with 20+ popups from some "free" software they installed. These are the people that dutifully close window after window every time they start their computer because they have no idea how to clean their autorun from uninstalled software that didn't quite uninstall properly. These are the people that surf on 5" browser windows on 30" screens because the rest of the browser real estate is hogged by "browser bars" they somehow installed and now don't know how to get rid of.
The ad industry managed to piss THESE people off enough that they installed ad blockers!
And now they are whining and begging and threatening and complaining that their ad revenue dried up. And they beg and plead to deactivate and uninstall those adblockers. But there is no going back. These people will continue to block. Worse, it's likely they don't even know how to deactivate it, even if they could be bothered to do it.
YouTube, you're about to learn the same lesson. Why do you insist in touching the stove yourself, ain't it enough that everyone else is already crying over scorched hands?
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If the ad market tanks, hopefully it will kill facebook and neuter google. Is that naive? It sounds naive.. but hope springs eternal.
Dear god, please let that happen.
Re: You may learn from the mistakes of others, ya (Score:2)
Here's to peace in Korea and a crash in the ad market. Cheers!
What Youtube Ads? (Score:3)
Since the adpocolypse, I block all ads on youtube. Any channel that I care about already got demonitized, so I pay them directly with Patreon or buying shit from them.
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Pretty much this.
Ok, granted, I've been blocking that shit for ages, but now I at least have a moral justification.
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How is drive-by-malware-installation not a moral justification?
And anyone is free to display whatever parts of a website is sent to them that they like, and discard the rest. That's how the internet was designed. If you want complete control over what's on someone's screen, make an app.
I get that we'e built an economy of serving ads on the web, but it's essentially building a house on quicksand. The underlying foundation is not stable, and not wise to build on. There is no requirement that what you send som
Bummer dude ... (Score:1)
Wow, I play my collection of music I bought on CDs and ripped to MP3 in all sorts of ways, and I never hear ads.
How tragic that when you stream your music from an ad platform that you get ... ads!
That is mystifying.
Sorry, no, I'm not subscribing to music. Not from Apple, not from Google, and definitely not from the music industry.
I still buy CDs and support the artists, but once that transaction is done, it's nobody's business when, where, how, and how often I listen to it.
When that option goes away, I'll
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Goodbye YouTube (Score:2)
Google Music ftw (Score:1)
I have a Google Music subscription, so I get Youtube Red (no commercials) for free.
The family plan is affordable and comparable to other services. And my son isn't bombarded with commercials on youtube. Win win.
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I have a Google Music subscription, so I get Youtube Red (no commercials) for free. The family plan is affordable and comparable to other services. And my son isn't bombarded with commercials on youtube. Win win.
Do you also enjoy paying HBO just to access Game of Thrones?
How about Netflix for their exclusive content? Hulu Plus? UFC? Spotify Premium? Tidal? Hell, even PBS now has a fee-based subscription service.
Sorry, but I don't call the continued fracturing of content across dozens of services a "win". It's death by 1,000 cuts, resulting in cord cutters financially "winning" about as good as a Charlie Sheen Truth tour. And when enough forced revenue is generated with this annoy-the-shit-out-of-the-customer
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Did you really think they'd let cord-cutters win
sensible_chuckle.jpg
Above all else, they'll find a way to extract their revenue.
I see ads almost every video (Score:2)
I see ads before almost every video, no matter how long it is. A few times I got ads much longer than the video itself. And I'm not even watching music videos. For music I already have Amazon Music and I don't care much about the videos.
Are you saying they'll frustrate me even more than this? Some of the ads I even watch once - if I'm interested, and they still flood me as much as they do my friend who snipes the skip button.
Be careful what you wish for, RIAA (Score:2)
Who is the TRUE beneficiary? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Cohen is trying to prove that YouTube is committed to making people pay for music and silence the "noise" about his company's purported harm to the recording industry..."
Oh, so you wish to silence the purported noise by forcing customers to pay by annoying the shit out of them? Thanks for clarifying what 21st Century customer service has become for those Too Big To Fail. A Fuck You Very Much And Have A Nice Day mantra from you friendly owns-the-neighborhood mega-corp. I've said it before. Corporate Arrogance is not a good thing, but there's never enough people that give a shit enough to stop it, so it will continue to spread like a disease.
"...The labels companies have long criticized YouTube for hosting videos that violate copyrights, and not paying artists and record companies enough."
Oh, so THAT is the reason you're doing this? You care about the artists? Well, I'll be waiting for your financial statements that show that 100% of the revenue generated from this WILL be supporting that justification then. Needless to say, I'm not holding my breath.
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Solutions: (Score:2)
(1) "mute" button
(2) rip the music off the video for future use, saved locally.
Problem solved without paying Gootube a dime.
THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE.. (Score:4, Funny)
Signed,
YouTube Management
Really? (Score:2)
"The labels companies have long criticized YouTube for hosting videos that violate copyrights, and not paying artists and record companies enough"
Just because that was, like, their entire business model.
Or more likely... (Score:2)
Or the more likely scenario.. people will stop using youtube for passive music listening.
I myself never relied on youtube for such things because there were already enough ads to make the experience more than a little irritating. So now they're going to add MORE ads?
They really didn't think this through, did they?
Give up, Internet "ruined" music biz (Score:2)
Recorded music is almost a commodity now. Trying to harvest it for the profit/revenue levels of yesteryear will fail.
The first reason is the most obvious: the Internet makes it easier to pirate music.
The second is there's more choice available now, thanks to the Web. If you make Option A too expensive, consumers will go with Option B, all the way down the alphabet (company name pun half intended).
The third is that many make free music for the sheer fun of it and it's easy to put online. Career musicians hav
While in reality... (Score:2)
... the plan is to increase the ad revenue.
Not just ads after songs (Score:2)
Yeah sure (Score:2)
YouTube Will 'Frustrate' Some Users With Ads So They use adblockers
There, fixed.
I'm okay with paying for music but (Score:2)
The problem I have is all the services want total control, I've flat out had songs removed from my playlist from an artist as they take them off the service, like google play, then have to go find the song on youtube.
I almost forgot the name of the song and would have never known except one of my devices hadn't updated yet and had it removed.
If there was more responsibility and accountability to provide proper access or notification if a song has been removed from the service it would be better.
In the end,
Youtube already frustrates me (Score:2)
ads (Score:2)
They already interleave pretty nearly every video with an ad, meaning that (assuming 5min videos) per hour you're seeing about the same number of commercials (12) as broadcast tv... ...I wonder how THAT'S going to work out for them?
Re: ads (Score:2)
YouTube - the same great viewer experience as broadcast TV, AND it reports your conversations to the Stasi!
Making the same mistake as terrestrial radio (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't pay musicians / songwriter effin squat. (Score:2)
Free unfortunately has limitations (Score:2)
The way I see it is that unfortunately at some point as annoying as it may be, YouTube needs to find a way to make money or at least break even on it's services. Nobody's keen on paying for a "free" service so stuck with ADs is how it's done. I know a lot of folks say that they're just going to hop to another "free" service but let's face it, you can't run a large global server service for free.
SUCH a poor idea.... (Score:2)
One thing I haven't seen mentioned, even though LOTS of other intelligent comments were made on why this is a bad idea?
A lot of people who are regular listeners to music via YouTube don't even care about the video content. They're strictly using it to stream the songs they want to hear. This would often be your pre-teens and teens who don't have money to pay for a music subscription but want to hear their favorite new music releases. If YouTube wanted them to consume less bandwidth, they could offer an opt
Bad strategy (Score:2)
Advertisers should be ticked that their ads are being used not to convince people to buy their products, but to drive people away from the advertising model as a whole, and this is being done intentionally.
Content creators shouldn't be too happy about this either, as the intended resul
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The ad industry is used to paying for the privilege to piss people off, there's nothing new here.
Re:youtube sucks (Score:4, Informative)
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I think that is the plan. Youtube wants you to only view a small subset of corporate advertiser friendly channels.
Re: Dump YouTube (Score:2)
In Soviet America, entertainment watches you!