VEVO.com – Totally avoidable and useless, but somehow embedded in my YouTube
VEVO.com is the new, recording company-owned music video site, and it’s horrible. Of course, this is what we have come to expect from the recording industry, as it follows its classic formula of self-destruction in the face of new media. Here’s how the process works:
- Refuse to acknowledge the pervasive nature of the Internet in terms of its ability to disseminate content.
- Notce item (1), above, is a huge mistake costing millions in revenue as people who want online content, get it, for free.
- Begin round of legal threats and costly lawsuits attempting to somehow eliminate or diminish the power of the Internet to achieve item (1).
- Realizing that litigation is costly and ineffective because of item (1), create a company-owned portal on the Internet for dissemination of content in a highly restrictive, buggy, and often unusable manner.
- Charge the same price as for tangible assets like CDs and DVDs, but don’t include things like cover art or bonus features, and ensure DRM makes the process of purchase merely a euphemism for ‘lease.’
- Repeat item (1) for next emerging P2P technology.
In this context, you can see that it’s really no surprise the VEVO.com is terrible, and as such, will probably be a failure of epic magnitude. After all, this pattern of litigation and inferior offerings has not exactly endeared the populace to the RIAA’s membership, who apparently deluged VEVO’s mailboxes with enough complaints that a blog post was written on the (almost completely hidden) VEVO blog acknowledging that the site had been “totally slammed” by pretty much everyone, although the blame is placed on the exceptional amount of visitors (a comment on the post correctly points out that embedding content in YouTube would probably drive visitors to VEVO, a move that should have been anticipated). However, that post is dated the 9th of December, and as of today I am still unable to use Firefox to watch videos (and worse yet, there’s no acknowledgment on the site of this seemingly widespread issue). This means I will not be using the service, and I’ll probably try to avoid YouTube more than usual.
Additionally, VEVO has asked the site Muziic to discontinue using the API provided by VEVO, as it turns out that the API does not deliver the ads it is supposed to. In other words, VEVO wrote bad code, someone is using it because it has been provided, and VEVO is demanding that they stop. Awesome.
Hopefully YouTube is seeing a pattern of people discontinuing their YouTube sessions upon finding VEVO content, and this will cause them to apply pressure on VEVO to get their act in gear. As it is now, the site is just shameful, and another sad failure in a line of such failures for the record companies. I am reminded of a line in the NOFX song ‘Dinosaurs Will Die,’ that applies here:
Prehistoric music industry
Three feet in La Brea tar
Extinction never felt so good
(0/5)
NB: VEVO logo not included because I don’t have the means to defend myself against the inevitable lawsuit.
Comments
Twilight fan (Jun 25, 2010)
Did you guys know that Twilight eclipsse has leaked…
see here http://secretshack.info/twilight-eclipse/
Mike Phillips (Mar 21, 2011)
I prefer http://www.exploretunes.com