If record companies could, they’d sue every kid who ever played a cd for his friend. They want every song ever played outloud to generate revenue for them (as evidenced by an effort last year to charge RIAA public performance fees to local musicians covering signed artists in coffee shops). There is (evident in this post, as well as generally in the Big Corporate Music Industry) a fundamental ignorance of promotion in the old media and its adherents that will inevitably lead to their demise, just as surely as there aren’t many coopers around today who aren’t employed by the liquor industry.

If Joe puts up a video for this band he likes up on YouTube, an I am Joe’s friend, I am likely to watch the video and see what all the fuss is about. If I like it, I’ll see about getting the CD from iTunes. That is, in fact, exactly how I go about finding new music. This generates revenue for the label and the musician. (Or it WOULD generate revenue for the musician, if the labels paid anything out to the actual artist.) Since my social network has moved out of the arcades, parking lots, and record stores of my youth and online, connecting members of that network to new media has also made the transition. Record companies can’t behind that, because they don’t understand the evolution of social networking, and they’re not creative enough to come up with new revenue streams.

This Amazon thing mentioned, for instance. The record co puts up a video on YouTube with a link to iTunes (to download the song/album) and Amazon (to the album page). iTunes gives them a kickback via affiliate revenue, as does Amazon. The record co should give a portion of that kickback to the artist. When the clicker buys the album, they get a portion of that as a media purchase anyhow. As an added benefit, for a customer going through an Amazon affiliate link, the affiliate gets 20% of everything they buy for 24 hours. Not bad money on the small scale.

That’s really what we’re talking about — record companies have to learn to look at micro-income and reduce their overhead, rather than big purchase. There’s still resistance, for instance, to buying by the song through iTunes. Backward, backward. Artists have to learn not to depend on Big Labels for promotion, and self-promote. They’ll make more money during their growing popularity that way anyhow.

There are also differences between Derivative Works and Fair Use, some of which applies to YouTube videos, but that’s covered at length elsewhere.