As we reported last week, aside from removing the embed feature from their YouTube Page, Warmer Music Group took it a step further by actually removing videos from some artists personal pages. Today, in an interview with Billboard, Warner Music Group Chairman/CEO of Recorded Music for the Americas and the U.K.Warner’s label chief Lyor Cohen addressed the situation, among others.
Aside from the video-flap, Cohen touched on a bevy of subjects in the interview, including iTunes DRM-free downloads and price flexibility, the sue-happy RIAA and the dreaded “major label” tag for artists looking to move on up.
In December, Warner pulled its songs off of YouTube, saying it wasn’t being fairly compensated for its music. Cohen is more optimistic about Lala.com, an online startup in which Warner holds a stake. And although he’s happy about Apple’s recent decision to grant labels more pricing flexibility, he’s hoping the company will give them still more in the future
Cohen’s comments regarding the removal of the videos from YouTube: At the beginning we believed wholeheartedly that we needed to be the enabler. We believe that there’s not going to be one magic solution to this but it’s important to encourage people to experiment. So we went and started being very easy to license with. [But] we just haven’t received enough compensation. They haven’t figured out how to monetize it well enough to make our share significant enough.
And on the future of enabling their fans to access WMG content: We’re thinking less about enabling for enabling’s sake and asking ourselves at what point is this a transaction. I think we want to enable when there’s a clear path to revenue and it’s not cannibalizing our company.
Read the entire interview here.
Related:- Major Labels Finally Get This Internet Thing, Seem Bent On Making It Less Fun
- Labels vs. Fun Part II: WMG Pulls Videos From Artists’ Channels
- Ongoing War On Fun: YouTube Mutes Audio On Copyrighted Songs
- Universal And Google Team Up To Make Music Video Site, Clearly Don’t Know About YouTube
- Hey Facebook, Forget The Major Labels, There Are Thousands Of Indies Who Are More Than Willing To Work With You
