Announcement: Some Thoughts on My YouTube Channel

As I mentioned yesterday, I've just started a new YouTube channel in order to circumvent the increasingly busy copyright police targeting this blog. Here are my initial thoughts.

I uploaded all of what I consider my albums of completely unreleased material for the letter A. Those are mostly full concerts. Of those, I was allowed to post 17, and four have been blocked. The blocked ones are of AC/DC, Adele, America, and the Allman Brothers. It turns out though that ALL but one of the albums I uploaded have copyright issues, it's just that YouTube allows the posting of copyrighted material in most cases. YouTube runs some kind of analysis program as you're uploading material that checks for copyright issues. If there's so much as a similar melody to a copyrighted song, that gets flagged before it gets posted.

So basically my distinction of released and unreleased is irrelevant from YouTube's point of view, because any version of any copyrighted song is a copyright issue. Even if I were to sing and play a cover version and upload that, that would be an issue. I read somewhere though that Google, which owns YouTube, has paid the major record companies for the rights to have their music on YouTube, which is why so much gets allowed there. It's just some artists and/or record labels didn't agree which causes problems.

But at least there seems to be some logic and consistency with YouTube's policies. What's weird is that, as a test, I uploaded two albums that had recently been hidden here, one by Graham Nash and the other by the Doobie Brothers. Both of them passed the copyright check on YouTube and are currently available there! For those two only, I've included the direct download links on their YouTube pages. (For the others, I typically post the link to the relevant page of this blog, where they can find the links.) So if you want those, you can now get them there. 

I'm going to experiment with posting other stuff on YouTube that gets hidden here. I'll un-hide those albums here, but with the download links removed, and direct people to go to the relevant YouTube page for the downloads instead. So hopefully if something gets blocked/hidden here, it'll be available there, and vice versa. 

However, I'm going to hold off on posting lots of stuff at YouTube for the time being, to see how things play out there. It's nice that one gets a copyright check before posting, so you can choose not to post if there's a problem. As opposed to what's been happening recently on this blog, where albums that have already been posted get seemingly randomly hidden at random times. That way, one doesn't get any strikes against their account. But it's still possible for a strike and/or warning to come along later, and your account gets totally banned if there are three strikes in a six month time period. (And by the way, what's crazy is that YouTube and blogger.com are both owned by Google, so you'd think they'd flag the same music in the same way, but they definitely don't.)

So I don't want to post a lot of stuff at YouTube just yet, only to possibly have my account get banned and lose all that work. For now, I'll mostly stick to posting complete, unreleased concerts, and wait some months to see if they stay available or if any further copyright problems develop.

Anyway, thanks for your patience with all this. One way or another, I'm determined to make and keep this music publicly available.