Last January Warner Music Group forced YouTube to remove all of its music from the site, citing disputes over royalty payments. This led to an outcry from users, who created protest videos once YouTube started muting or pulling down any user-generated content that contained WMG songs as background music. Today, those songs are starting to make their way back to the world’s largest video portal: music videos for Madonna, Green Day, and Bee Gees, among others, are now live on YouTube for the first time in nearly a year.
That’s great news. But the new videos will look a bit odd to anyone who has used YouTube before — they’re all decked out with extensive branding, including colorful backgrounds and large links to the artist’s products. Warner alone has the ability to do this, because of a deal it negotiated that gives it far more control over its pages than other content partners have. Warner is allowed to control its own branding, and can sell its own ads against both its own music videos and the user generated content that features its songs, with the majority of the revenue from these ads going to WMG (YouTube will take a cut as well).
At this point the branding isn’t awful, but it’s a concession YouTube surely wasn’t eager to make. After all, now that Warner has the ability to brand their clips however they want, other content owners will want to do it themselves. If YouTube agrees to that, we’ll lose the relatively uniform layout on the site in favor of something that’s more reminiscent of (the old) MySpace. And there’s always the risk that Warner won’t be happy with its initial results and may try some more aggressive branding, which could get even more annoying.
At this point it looks like only a fraction on Warner’s content has been reintroduced to the site, though we can likely expect more of it to come online in the next few weeks.
Jason, please check your email (from Erick). Im outside your office
Looks like the also have country restrictions in place on the content. Can’t be viewed in Canada.
It’s not as bad as you make it look like at first with the images in the post
how is this different from letting the video shake apart the site?
seems like warner is not the only one. Funny or Die’s youtube channel is, if anything, more aggressively branded: http://www.yout....com/funnyordie
Yeah that’s their Channel page. The Watch page looks normal: http://www.yout...h?v=F6g85lp2wJc
I clicked the seal link, hoping to hear kissed by a rose.
instead i got the beegees. is this warner’s attempt to bring back disco?
This troubles me.
Disco should make a comeback. I’m totally 100% game, who else is in?
I really don’t mind this as long as it about the artist of the video its easier for me to figure out when i’m on the artist youtube channel.
Great, country restrictions again. Can’t view them outside the US.
The beginning of the end for YouTube – thanks Warner!
I like YouTube because it focuses on the content – videos! Not all this other distracting crap and design.
Boo! Can’t see this from Canada
ugh. this is not good for uniformed design. if they’re doing this for companies they should atleast give a little bit more power to the other content creators on youtube (the average person) and allow them the same tools to manage their page and pick their targeted ads based on the viewership.
Dear Warner,
You F@*&%#@ fail.
Signed,
Everyone
+Over 9000
the first thing i thought after seenig this headline, reading the story and seeing that ugly background wrap was FUCK warner. ugh.
My eyes now hurt.
it doesn’t look that different from the rest of youtube.
and it’s still slow as shit … so people will know they’re at youtube.
This wouldn’t bother me as much if you could still view the videos full width of the website or in a popup window, but those have been removed too.
when will my videos be available and live once again?
as lyor himself might say, content like madonna enables the company to make a lot of mistakes. looking forward to the dire straits/mark knopfler stuff myself.
This ’sounds’ good. But are ‘we’ allowed to upload WMG stuff. It will only help them out in the long run (free advertising). Or are we just allowed to favorite their vids.