Infringing Youtube Video Helps Album Sales

Watch this video in HD (it’s far bet­ter that way).

It’s not uncom­mon for YouTube users to upload videos con­tain­ing copy­righted music. In fact, it hap­pens so fre­quently that Google has devel­oped sys­tems to find and disable/mute such infring­ing videos. Rather then see the poten­tial pro­mo­tional ben­e­fits of fan made videos, record labels have gen­er­ally claimed these uploads are hurt­ing their prof­its. Anti-piracy orga­ni­za­tions such as the RIAA, BPI and CRIA actively patrol web­sites like YouTube, search­ing for infring­ing con­tent and forc­ing it’s removal.

In one instance, song­writer Calvin Har­ris found that a video clip he uploaded him­self had been dis­abled for copy­right infringe­ment. The prob­lem con­tent: one of his own songs. As the record­ing indus­try seems to be doing sim­i­lar things all the time, it’s nice to hear of an instance where com­mon sense pre­vailed… although in this case it’s not the record labels who have seen the light.

Recently a beau­ti­ful video of the Oki­nawa Chu­raumi Aquar­ium in Japan went viral on YouTube. The clip hap­pened to fea­ture the song “Please Don’t Go” by Barcelona… with­out their per­mis­sion. Rather then demand­ing the video be taken down, the band cre­ated a response video of their own, thank­ing their fans and stat­ing that the sit­u­a­tion had actu­ally helped their sales.

“We’re so flat­tered to learn that it fea­tures one of our songs called Please Don’t Go,” Barcelona’s lead singer Brian Fen­nell says in the video response.

“We want to let you know that it’s been affirm­ing in the last week to watch in the iTunes store a cor­re­la­tion with the sales of our record ‘Absolutes’, grow­ing in the rock charts as a result of hav­ing the song placed in the video,” drum­mer Rhett Stonelake added.

As of today, the video has been viewed over 2 mil­lion times, gar­ner­ing pub­lic­ity for both the band and the aquar­ium. It’s great to see an instance where fan videos aren’t always the death of the music industry.

via ‘Pirated’ Youtube Clip Boosts Band’s Album Sales | Tor­rent­F­reak.