I was trying to make a playlist for tomorrow and kept running into this:
I’ve never heard of SESAC and I wasn’t looking for wild videos out of left field. The Ronettes “Be My Baby” and INXS “Need You Tonight” were two of my searches. I did a quick browse on Reddit (because, cesspool that it can be, those people know things faster these days than the wasteland Elon has created on Twitter), and apparently SESAC owns the rights to millions of songs by tons of artists, including the likes of Adele and Nirvana, and they couldn’t reach an agreement with YouTube.
Thousands of songs and music videos by hundreds of artists have vanished from YouTube after the video site failed to reach a new agreement with publishing rights organization SESAC.
…
“We have held good faith negotiations with SESAC to renew our existing deal. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we were unable to reach an equitable agreement before its expiration,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement Saturday to Variety.
“We take copyright very seriously and as a result, content represented by SESAC is no longer available on YouTube in the US. We are in active conversations with SESAC and are hoping to reach a new deal as soon as possible.”
(cont. Rolling Stone)
Nobody really keeps a cache of music videos on their computer or hard drives, so it’s not the perfect example, but it does serve to underscore the tenuous position we’ve all put ourselves in with our reliance on digital media. I have thousands of CDS……….somewhere. I honestly don’t know where they are. I started collecting them after my 8th birthday and I used to rip off Columbia House as often as possible. They ran that ridiculous “11 CDs for a penny” deal over and over, and I gave them a new mailing address each time. I went to used CD stores constantly and I shopped for new music every Tuesday. By the time I moved into my first apartment in college, and I had multiple books of CDs — those three-ring binders that would hold 8 CDs on each page if you used the front and back.
By the time I moved to NYC, I was already transitioning to digital media because I had bought an Archos and loaded it up with most of my favorites. I came to the city with $500 and two suitcases, so none of my CDs made the cut. Fifteen years later, I’m not even sure where they would be. The garage where they would have been most likely to be found, along with anything else that belonged to me, is behind a house that nobody in my family lives in anymore — my dad rents it out. I do still have most of my CD collection, digitally, on an external hard drive, but if that thing crashes or gets damaged, that’s thousands of albums gone, many of which you can’t find on a streaming service.
And the streamers are where we’re really shooting ourselves in the foot. It’s one thing to have digital media that you own, but it’s a whole other thing to have digital media that you simply view for free or have access to for a monthly charge. Your enjoyment of that media is up to the whims of the executives in charge of pricing, the executives in charge of partnerships with artists, the executives in charge of contracts with copyright holders, or the executives in charge of deciding whether they want to pay residuals to keep a show on their platform.
I was one of the few people who still really loved Westworld on HBO. It was still in my top ten, the entire time, and I was very much looking forward to seeing how the fourth season would play out. I didn’t have a subscription, but I wanted to wait until the season was finished so I could binge it. I avoided spoilers, the season wrapped in August, and then I got my subscription in October. They pulled the show off the platform in November.
Bill Cosby is a touchy subject, so I won’t linger too long here, but you cannot find the Huxtables on television anymore. I think TV One is the only US station that will air it, but I’m glad I saved all 8 seasons in the early 2000s, because it’s mine now. Any show you love could potentially be lost to the dustbin of history if one of its stars makes the program unprofitable to air.
But what about my other faves? I don’t own any of my favorite moves on DVDs. The only album in my Top 10 that I have on vinyl is Renaissance. And television shows? Well I do own my Girls Trifecta — Gilmore Girls, The Golden Girls, and Girlfriends — so I’m pretty set there. Should I become a collector? Isn’t that how hoarding starts?
I’m not giving any suggestions here — just painting a picture and expressing my annoyance. I’m honestly just typing while my nails dry so I don’t get in the bed and mess up my manicure, but this SESAC vs Youtube kerfuffle does serve as a reminder to ask yourself: should I make more efforts to own my favorite media?
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