YouTube Inc. announced that it is talking with multiple record labels to be able to enter deals to offer their music videos online, according to a report by Reuters. The goal they say is to go beyond a home video sharing site to offering mainstream entertainment options.
They are in negotiations to be able to put archived as well as up to date music videos on their site. They added that whatever business model they adapt will make sure that the videos are available for free.
Co-founder Steve Chen told Reuters, "What we really want to do is in six to 12 months, maybe 18 months, to have every music video ever created up on YouTube, we're trying to bring in as much of this content as we can on to the site. We add the whole user community feel, with 100 million views every day and user-generated content."
Michael Nash, senior vice-president of digital and business development at Warner Music added, "We're obviously interested in legitimate use scenarios and trying to broaden those, and our focus with YouTube is how to be partners while protecting our artists and ensuring they get paid."
YouTube claims that they account for 60 percent of all online videos watched.
This will be an interesting situation to watch. Will YouTube lose a lot of its amateur users when the professional content is added? Will they add monetization to the user-generated videos? Will you want to interact in the new YouTube environment? If everybody starts to do this, will it simply become a commodity? What will be the difference between downloading from YouTube or another download site? Will anybody care?
These are questions that need to be answered because the entertainment industry has already made it clear that they aren't going to allow only one company to manage their properties. They refused to let Apple iTunes handle it exclusively as they will all others.
If YouTube becomes identified as mainstream media, will they become just another failed web startup? Do you think they will?
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