Buma/Stemra VS Embedded Audio Streams
At the end of July the Dutch collecting society for composers and music publishers, Buma/Stemra, announced plans to let bloggers pay for embedded audio streams on their blogs, starting from 2010. These streams include embedded YouTube music videos.
Last week the society announced the prices (.pdf) for embedding videos, which are rather shocking:
- 6 embedded files € 130 / year
- 12 embedded files € 260 / year
- 30 embedded files € 650 / year
- 31 and more embedded files € 650 x (number blocks of 30 files) / year
To me, Buma/Stemra’s plans are lacking meaning and sense.
Ask yourself why bloggers post music videos they find on, for example, YouTube. Probably because they have an opinion about the music, and want to let others know. Many music blogs push music videos the artists themselves put on YouTube in order to create or enlarge awareness, just the way we on ViralBlog post commercials and write about online marketing. We like (or sometimes dislike) what we see and want to spread the word.
Take the Esmée Denters story for example. Where would she be without YouTube and people spreading her music? Probably not at Timberlake’s label. Think of all the artists trying to make it and get their music heared by as many as possible. I bet they are more than happy when their music spreads over the internet because people like what they here and embed the video on their sites. It’s free publicity. Sure artists should be compensated for the hard work they put into their music, but the question is whether this compensation should always be money. Isn’t the free publicity not a big enough reward?
After the not so clever decision of certain major labels in the USA to hunt for money for the 30 sec clips on iTunes and related websites, this is yet another desperate move from that part of the music business which seems to be completely internet unwhise and which creates a very negative image for the whole of the music business. So, conclusion: instead of helping the rightholders, they are actually turning the whole blogging music community from Holland against them.
Buma/Stemra uses its own crawler to detect copyright infractions (this crawler is now used to detect background music on websites). The society holds the owner of the website responsible for copyrighted content. This means music blogs that still want to offer artists their free publicity will have to move to blogger services or social networks where they will not be held responsible.
Follow us on Twitter, sign up for our weekly e-mail or watch the ViralTracker social video metrics demo.
Related Posts
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Niels- you are pretty soft on Buma / Stemra with your reamkr:
To me, Buma/Stemra’s plans are lacking meaning and sense.
I feelBuma/Stemra’s plans are insane. And that is even the understatement of the year. Have they completely gone mad??
What do others feel about their plans?
Cheers
Igor
To Buma Stemra proves with this plans that they haven’t got a clue how it works in social.
Do they understand that many artists upload they’re materials on purpose? Of course spreading illegal copies of muscis and video is a big problem. But perhaps Buma/Stemra can help the entertainment world to earn money another way.
See what Sellaband does with the Public Enemy: http://www.sellaband.com/publicenemy
Invest $25 in the new Public Enemy album, and get rewarde for your support.