Music on YouTube, the Joy of Playlists and the Death of Music Ownership

For a while now I’ve been spending a lot of time using YouTube to find music that I don’t own, or even tracks that I just can’t find anywhere else! In fact, for a while now most of the music I play is coming straight from an on-line source; whether this be YouTube, MySpace, Last.fm, Beatport, FaceBook, The BBC etc… You get the point anyway!

But one thing I’d always struggled with is the lack of continuity in what I’m listening to, especially with YouTube as I always had to flick to the next track. The solution was staring me in the face. It was a simple feature of YouTube that I’d been missing, the playlist [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpFDzBOKp34]! YouTube regulars will probably be cursing me now and labelling me a pebble for such an over sight!

Here’s a playlist I did just for you!

The Variety of Music Available

I often get a tune in my head for some reason and if I don’t own that tune I’ll fire my machine up type site:youtube.com “name of tune” and it’s usually first. If I don’t know the name I might have to search for a few of the lyrics I know and 99% of the time I can figure it out.

The wealth of music that’s featured on YouTube is huge and it is, for me, the main music search engine. There have been a few reports recently on the relationships that YouTube (a.k.a. Google) has with the major record labels, most noticeably the arrangements with Sony and Warner [http://uk.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUKTRE51C0NR20090213]. So it would appear that YouTube is perfectly placed to seize control of the current on-line music industry from iTunes.

Is this the future of Music?

So is this the next stage in the development of the music industry? Have we gone from 12inch records to CDs to MP3s to not even owning any physical copy of the music we listen to? Is our entire CD collection going to be in the cloud? Let’s face it this could be an easier way for the record industry to take back some control of what we pay to listen to music. Last.fm charges a subscription and members get to listen to as much as they want so why couldn’t the same principal be applied to a fee for unlimited access to EMI’s entire back catalogue which we can playlist as we wish?

The only draw back could be the mobile music market. iPods still rule the roost in that market and mobile connectivity isn’t quite good enough to reliably stream music. So in the meantime downloads will have to continue but there’s nothing to say that it wont be possible to stream music from almost any location soon enough – making the download obsolete.

One thing’s for sure, as with most technical industries, the online music industry is changing so rapidly it’s nearly impossible to predict what will happen. Fashions change as well, so who knows?! In 20 years time we might all be sat there listening to vinyl on a gramophone claiming that listening to poor quality digital sound is a crime against music!