unenlightened self-interest

Ted Gioia:

People often ask me why I don’t teach a YouTube lecture course on jazz history. It’s a great idea — but I can’t teach the course without playing music, and record labels would shut me down in a New York minute.

It’s absurd. I might be able to develop a huge new audience for jazz — maybe even a million new fans. The record labels would benefit enormously. But that doesn’t matter. They would still shut me down.

Rick Beato deserves better than this. His audience knows how much good Beato does. We see how much he loves the music and how much he supports the record labels and their artists. They should give him their support in return.

If UMG wants to retain a shred of my respect, they need to act now. And if they don’t, maybe the folks at YouTube should get involved. They are bigger than any record labels, and this might be a good time for them to show where they stand.

Just as Universal Music Group should have the brains to know that their music showing up on Rick Beato’s channel is good for them, so also YouTube should know that it’s in their interest to support their creators when possible: the more people who watch Beato’s channel the better it is for YouTube. But one of the fascinating things about our megacorporations is how unenlightened and unreflective their self-interest (i.e. rapacity) is. Unlike Ted, I doubt that anyone in authority at YouTube cares about creators. They should; it’s stupid not to; but if they haven’t always been stupid they’ve been stupified.

Who stupefied them? Right now I’m reading Dan Wang’s brilliant book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, and the governing distinction of his book is a simple but, in its development, very powerful one: China is run by engineers, while America is run by lawyers. And engineers are very good at making things happen, while lawyers are very good at preventing things from happening.

This is not Wang’s way of saying that China is superior to America: he makes it clear that when engineers are in control they often end up making stuff that should never have been made, and that lawyers often prevent the bad stuff from being unleashed on the world. His point is that if you want to know which of these two massively powerful countries will dominate the next few decades, you need to know who’s in control in each country.

At Universal Music Group, the lawyers control the engineers, so they assign the engineers to write code that will auto-detect copyright violations and then auto-send takedown notices to the supposed violators. That the code returns a lot of false positives is of no concern to the lawyers: for them it’s better that ninety-nine innocent people be punished than one copyright violator go free. Likewise, while they know that U.S. copyright law has fair use provisions, they hate those provisions, and would prefer ninety-nine people who stay within the boundaries of fair use to be punished than to allow one person who transgresses fair use limits to go free.

When Rick Beato — like thousands of other music-focused YouTubers — gets a takedown notice from YouTube, he can contest it, arguing that his musical clips were so short that they clearly fell within the scope of fair use, or that he actually didn’t use the UMG-owned music at all. But then someone at YouTube has to evaluate his claim, and does YouTube have enough people assigned to the task of evaluating claims? Of course not. Is the evaluation of such claims the kind of thing that can be reliably assessed by bots? Of course not. So the easiest thing for YouTube to do is to sustain the takedown demand and demonetize the offending (or “offending”) videos.

The next step for Beato would be a lawsuit, against UMG or YouTube or both, but while Beato is a very rich man compared to me he is poverty-stricken in comparison with corporations like UMG and Alphabet. If he could survive financially long enough to get to trial — something that the corporations would do everything in their extensive power to prevent — he would surely win his case. But then there would be appeals.

The message of UMG and Alphabet to creators is simply this: It doesn’t matter if the law is on your side, we are so much bigger than you that we will destroy you. And they’re almost certainly right; I don’t even think a class-action suit entered by all the offended creators would be able to overcome the weight of megabucks.

As I say, it’s just stupid. Because the music companies are terrified of losing even more economic ground than they’ve already lost, they treat their best friends as enemies. They’d be appalled and disgusted by the idea that they need people like Rick Beato and Ted Gioia, but they do. They’re like a zillionaire being swept away by a flood: some redneck on the bank tosses him a lifeline, and before he goes under for the last time the zillionaire sputters, What’s in it for me?