Apple's Deals May Transform Digital Music

businessweek.com

3 pointsansy3 comments

It sounds like the deal fell through over concerns about copyrighted music showing up in YouTube and Google search results. It can be pretty easy to imagine why the deal failed if the RIAA tried hard to get broad censorship rights as part of the license agreement. But it also would have been pretty dumb of them because Google could have put a "Buy the MP3" link whenever someone did search for pirated music on Google or YouTube.

Probably this is half the story, something more along the lines of "censor or much more than 100mil"

I imagine dealing with the RIAA was giving Google flashbacks of Google China and Google Books. Everyone wants to extort Google and censor the search results while viewing Google's goals with hostility.

Google needs to make a YouTube of music services that will host anyone's music for others to stream freely. Give content creators a cut of the advertising revenue and provide a store front to sell mp3s direct to consumers. Make some indie millionaires and attract a few high profile experiments and the music labels will start submitting music the same way as everyone else.

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