Is YouTube Killing Music Piracy? For years the top record label executives have been claiming that it's impossible to compete with free, but YouTube is proving them wrong.
With billions of views every month the major record labels are making millions by sharing their music for free. For many people YouTube takes away the incentive to 'pirate,' but at the same time it may also cannibalise legal music sales. The music industry has witnessed some dramatic changes in recent years, even when piracy is left out of the picture. In just a decade the Internet and the MP3 revolution have redefined people’s music consumption habits. We’ve previously documented how people moved from buying albums to buying singles.
If we go back in time 5 or 6 years, people had only one option if they wanted to listen to their favorite artists online without paying for the pleasure. Although true music aficionados are hard to please, the majority of the public appreciates the option of listening to their favorite tunes for free on YouTube. Get more into movies on YouTube. Here at YouTube, we can’t get enough video.
When it comes to movies, we’re just as excited: YouTube hosts a great selection of movie trailers and showcases a variety of independent films in our Screening Room; last year we announced the ability to rent movies from Sundance Film Festival; and this year at Sundance we premiered Life in a Day, a documentary film about a single day on earth filmed by thousands of YouTube users, produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald.
Today, we’re announcing another step in our goal to bring more of the video you love to YouTube: the addition of thousands of full-length feature films from major Hollywood studios available to rent in the US at youtube.com/movies. In addition to the hundreds of free movies available on the site since 2009, you will be able to find and rent some of your favorite films. But your movie experience won't begin and end with a single film. YouTube Hires Paramount's Alex Carloss. YouTube is still trying to figure out how to link up with Hollywood.
Maybe Alex Carloss will help. Until last week, Carloss was head of digital distribution at Viacom’s Paramount. Now he’s a Google employee, working on YouTube’s content acquisition team. [UPDATE: Readers tell me Carloss left Paramount last fall.] He’ll work with Robert Kyncl, the Netflix veteran Google hired last year to figure out its strategy for working with Hollywood and other professional content-makers, which have yet to give the giant site all the video it wants. A Google rep confirmed the hire; I’ve asked Paramount about their plans to replace Carloss, who had been at the company for six years. After Google brought Kyncl on last fall, I assumed he would follow the script he’d used at Netflix, and start writing huge checks to the studios in order to get their movies and TV shows on the site.
Google/YouTube/Kyncl have been reaching out to content-makers in other ways, though.