I touched on the issue of major labels not allowing the embedding of their content, in a previous post “9 Myths and Mistakes in Online Music Marketing“. It’s my position that this is a Bad Move on the part of the majors, or any corporation that tries to do this. It is contrary to the nature of the viral sites they upload content to, such as YouTube, to try and prevent the obvious taking place. Why must they take tools designed for sharing and viral perpetuation and try and bend and warp them to their will? If you don’t want to play nice, just get out of the sandbox instead of trying to own the sandbox for yourself. No one likes a bully.

Lucas Gonze presents a much more eloquent and well-balanced view of this issue in this blog post, “the business impact of requesting to disable embedding of music videos in label channels on YouTube.” He believes, and I’m sure he’s correct, that such moves are an attempt to gain leverage over portals like YouTube to assist them in negotiating revenue deals and also control of distribution. While Lucas doesn’t like to bash the labels for the sake of it, and is sympathetic to the “constraints” under which they work, I am not so compassionate.

The more I hear about labels trying to negotiate their own cuts etc with the Myspaces, YouTubes etc of the world, the more irritated I become because I believe that the consequences of this are never good for the indies or for music consumers and fans. They are in fact creating what Lucas describes in a previous post as the anti-internet: “Imagine a web in which every relationship had to be negotiated by hand. It would be the opposite of the internet.” Now where’s the fun in that? I’m sure it makes great business sense for them to try and do this - systematically cut themselves in on any successful business model/distribution channel that anyone creates - but I am basically philosophically opposed to what I see as dressing bullying up as business, when the impact will most likely be at others’ expense -whether its fans, or artists outside of their system.

I’m not anti-copyright or anything along those lines. I believe music should be paid for unless the artist/rights-holder says otherwise. But the majors are seemingly trying to fight against the whole evolution of web 2.0 which is characterized by user-preference, customization, collaboration and a plethora of distribution points. The labels are trying to control every point of distribution which would seem to be a losing battle, when distribution is in the hands of the masses. They cannot, by force of will, force the internet to regress to 1.0 where content was closer to being fixed, immutable and controlled by one or two parties. Hasn’t the death of DRM taught them anything? Wasn’t that an almighty waste of resources? The embedding battle seems like a similar fiasco in the making….