mikehalloran wrote:My advice: Write your own songs, register the copyrights as published so that, when Google pays, you are entitled to a share, join a PRO (I belong to ASCAP) so that you get paid your share, make your own clever videos that get 250,000 hits...
Do you see where I am going with this?
Yeah Mike, I do. Here's the whole point though, and what the guy interviewing was espousing. I'm not naming names because I'd just rather not. But the idea is if you're unknown, you can write your own songs, register copyrights, register it with ASCAP (I've done this many times myself)... you can then put a video on YouTube which is all well and good. Guess what? Unless you're well known and have a huge promotional budget, you're not going to come close to ending up with 250,000+ subscribers YouTube channel. To hear the artist interviewed describe it, their hits and subscribers exploded when they started posting cover songs.
What this band was doing, was essentially leeching off the marketing investment of an established artist. Someone types in that artist name or the name of the song in a YouTube search, their band comes up and somebody curious listens to it, likes it perhaps, and then listens to other music of theirs and subscribes to their YouTube channel. Otherwise, how searches will turn up the little-known artist if nobody knows their name or the name of their song?
In a way, what I'm saying is that this is really sort of a sneaky way of search engine optimization. Thousands of times per day people are googling a hot song by a well known artist and you're appearing in the results. That kind of search action isn't happening on the lesser known artist's name or song.
So in a way, it kind of is sleazy, but I'm sure people will pass it off as "I just love [insert well-known artist] and this is my tribute to them" but in reality their capitalizing on that artist's marketing investment that made people enter that search term in the first place. The indy artist doesn't CARE that they're not getting any money or can't claim copyright... that's small price to pay for the sort of hits their going to get riding the coattails of the well known artist.
Perhaps there is a more kosher way to do it. For example, license the song and release a proper recording either physically or iTunes and then put up the video perhaps. Like I said, I raise this issue because when I listened to the interview, it seemed murky to me. I even wrote the indy music guru who sends out this email and brought up some of these issues and asked what he thought about that. Haven't heard back yet, but I only emailed this morning.
