It came out today that YouTube intends to “frustrate”
viewers of its content by embedding more ads in its some of its music videos,
thereby incentivizing users to pay for its soon-to-be-released subscription
music service. The more ad-heavy videos will be targeted at “passive” YouTube
users who leave YouTube open for hours at a time, treating it like a free music
service.
Per AdAge and Bloomberg, the Company is “trying to
prove that YouTube is committed to making people pay for music and silence the ‘noise’
about [YouTube CEO Lyor Cohen's] company’s purported harm to the recording
industry” by violating copyrights and inadequately compensating artists and
record labels.
Ugh.
On one hand, as Bloomberg
notes, YouTube launching a paid music service will challenge Spotify's and
Apple Music’s dominance in digital music. Though YouTube has been unsuccessful in
launching paid music services in the past, CEO Cohen proclaims that this attempt
will be different and very much appeal to “die-hard music fans.” On the other hand, amid
the agitation this influx of ads will inevitably cause, I’m almost certain
users will defect to free, and potentially less annoying, music
services like Pandora or a limited version of Spotify.
The bigger and longer term question is, if this is what
Google is doing with respect to music, when and how will Amazon (eventually) respond?
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