“YouTube’s plan to provide ‘every’ music video free is a ‘nail in the coffin’ of the paid-for online content business model and potentially threatens the dominant position of Apple’s iTunes, according to City analysts,” Mark Sweney reports for The Guardian.
“The video filesharing website, where 100m clips are watched every day, is in talks with Warner Music and EMI to offer music video downloads for free. Revenue will be provided by advertising,” Sweney reports.
“‘Any service that YouTube puts in place is, almost beyond reasonable doubt, not going to be iPod compatible,’ said Mark Mulligan, vice-president at JupiterResearch. ‘If they develop portability – and that should definitely be on the table – then Apple could be in the unusual space of playing catch up,’ he added. ‘If YouTube can convert its massive online popularity then it could provide a significant reason for people to buy non-iPod devices, at the moment Apple is still the best bet for portable music watching. Either way it is a nail in the coffin of paid-for services as the dominant online model versus ad-funded alternatives,'” Sweney reports.
Full article here.
What percentage of iTunes video sales are music videos anyway? We’d venture a guess that TV shows make up the bulk of Apple’s paid-for video content business, not music videos. JupiterResearch’s Mulligan vastly overestimates the power of YouTube and their music video plans. People have invested in the iPod ecosystem, they’re not going to dump it all just because YouTube offers iPod-incompatible music videos with ads.
Related article:
NPD: Apple retains huge lead with 75.6% share of U.S. music player market – August 17, 2006
Wouldn’t YouTube Want to attract those 50 million
users to their website and court Apple?
I hate to disagree with MDN, but I buy quite a few music videos from apple. I would think they do a great deal of business.
ABOUT TIME! This is great news… its silly to pay for music videos, just silly. Now YouTube… how about free TV programmes.
Music videos are nothing more than advertisements for the artist, the song, and the record company. They should be free in the first place. It was a crime for iTunes to charge anything, period. No one should have to pay for advertising content.
if YouTube comes out with a YouTube portable player that you can download ALL their content including free TV shows AND free music videos then MAYBE Apple will have to play catch up.
I hate to disagree with “random reader”, but I don’t buy quite a few music videos from Apple. I don’t think they do a great deal of business.
Don’t people agree that YouTube’s business model is flawed? Don’t they spend like a million dollars a day on bandwidth costs alone? I know advertising will help with revenue but I fail to see how YouTube could sustain the service for a long time.
Bah.
Music video downloads to youtube may be significant in terms of the sites survival (via ad revenue), but for Apple, it’s a small slice of the iTunes pie, and with movies, it will quickly become a minor portion of Apple’s iPod/iTunes revenue and profitability.
YouTube boasts horrible video quality… I wonder if these music video’s will push higher quality, and one must wonder what the sound quality will be like?…
With Zune coming out soon, perhaps a file encyption that does NOT include a Redmond solution is in th works. It should only be a matter of time until one can download the music video, and strip the audio from the file…
Again, perhaps significant to YouTube, but not for Apple, nor will this dent Apple’s dominance – no matter how much the record labels hope it does…
ABOUT TIME! This is great news… its silly to pay for music videos, just silly. Now YouTube… how about free TV programmes.
—————–
So, it’s not silly to pay 99 cents for a song, but it is silly to pay $1.99 for a song and a video? Just checking.
Allen
I don’t understand your point?… Pay $1.99 for a music video (which should be free anyway) or pay $7.99 for an entire album… or pay 99 cent per song if you prefer.
What in the world is all of this attempt and language of the DEATH of the iPod/iTunes.
I mean fo’ reals…..”the iPod killer” “nail in the iTunes coffin”
Sheesh…why so much of wringing of the hands, sitting on the edge to see the iPods/iTunes die???????
I find it funny that there are no “Windows killer” articles or anyone desiring to kill off windows (though it will happen w/ intel macs and osx soon).
YouTube is great for off-the-cuff stuff, but the quality of the video is at a level that free is the only price that’s right (not to mention that horrible sound sync issues). YouTube and iTunes are not direct competitors. They could give away music for free, too, but if it’s monoaural audio that sounds like a phonograph record made by Thomas Edison, it’s not exactly going to hurt iTunes.
You are all forgetting a very important point:
IF YOU GET THE MUSIC VIDEO FREE, YOU ALSO GET THE SONG FOR FREE. Nobody’s making you watch the screen while the video is playing.
If the videos like everything else on YouTube (crappy), I don’t think I would bother anyway.
If YouTube will be giving the videos away then why would they not be ipod compatible? They would purposely lose the iPod as a content platform just so they can use M$ DRM to protect files that…don’t cost anything…
Does that make any sense at all?
So a leftist rag, the Guardian tauts free downloads. Oh yeah, that will go down big with the content owners. It’s all too clear to the Marxist brain that free always works. It works great for land in Zimbabwe, doesn’t it? If you don’t have to eat, that is. Punish producers and kill production.
Free works in the Linux world, because many of the contributors build reputations, which get them great jobs. Many get as good as they give. And companies like IBM love Linux, because IBM makes billions from managing corporate IT shops and also works to stop Microsoft’s domination.
Yes, some upcoming performing artists may put stuff out for free, but once they get well known, they will search out ways to be paid – and it’s bye bye YouTube.
This will entice teenagers who wouldn’t have bought the music videos anyway, but the diehard music fans who want their favorite artist videos aren’t going to want a commercial slapped at the beginning of their music video. They’ll buy the commercial free video instead.
Giving away music for free does not sound like a great business model to me. Do they mean streamng videos for free perhaps?
Something ain’t right here.
I already know how to extract YouTube videos to my desktop. I now just want to know when some innovative programmer is going create converter software to allow me to convert Flash video to QuickTime. Or to have Apple throw the switch in iTunes to handle FLV and SWF files.
LinuxGuy and Mac Prodigal Son
First you say this:
It’s all too clear to the Marxist brain that free always works.
THEN you say this:
Free works in the Linux world
So the Linux world is full of Marxist brains?
Pull your neocon brain out of your ass. Then you might see that this is not a political discussion.
No, you probably won’t want to see that. You’re likely more comfortable with your brain *right* where it is… in your rectum.
Have a nice life, jerkoff.
Isn’t You Tube Content just a variant of Flash Video? If it comes in your computer it can be captured and transcoded. It’s that simple (or complex).
Enough f#@king ads, I’ve prefer to record the few shows I watch on the tube now so I can ffwd through the ads.
NOTHING IS FREE.
Buy the song, get the music video for free if it exists… sell more video enabled iPods. a music video for the same price of a TV show is dumb.
Am I missing something here….? Exactly why should music videos be free? If I’m not mistaken music videos need Art Directors, Sound technicians, continuity, choreography, lighting, blah, blah, blah. Don’t these people count all of a sudden… or do you people believe that fairies and pixie dust produces music videos?
Last time I checked, these people deserve to be paid for their work too. If a video is a marketing tool to promote the label’s music, then what is the music track itself if not a marketing tool for the artist?
Getting something for free means someone, somewhere didn’t get paid for their work. That’s wrong, anyway you slice it!
The quality of the video (and often the sound) on YouTube is sucktacular at best the vast majority of the time. That’s going to effect people’s purchasing decisions.