Trying to Make a Dollar Out of 15 cents.

Amanda Palmer of Dresden Dolls fame is pissed. As the NY Times noted Sunday, Warner Bros. has yanked all of their music videos from Youtube:

"Unable to reach new licensing terms, the Warner Music Group has demanded that thousands of its videos be removed from YouTube, which is owned by Google. Warner Music’s videos, the source of a billion views on YouTube, gradually began disappearing from the site on Saturday, although many remained online Sunday evening."

This announcement set Amanda off:

"in other words, roadrunner is a subsidiary of warner and i’m stuck in hell with madonna and the other poor bastards, because warner wants more money. even worse, warner has almost no bargaining power…they’re not even in the top ten of labels who have huge artists with material streaming on youtube. they’re just starving for cash right now and they’re doing anything they can think of to come up with cash. it’s abSURD. they are looking for money in a totally backwards way.

money that, i should point out, i would NEVER see as an artist. if they got their way and youtube decided to give them a larger revenue share of the videos, it;s very unlikely it would ever make it’s way into the artists’ bank accounts.

damn, man. this shit is fucked UP."

The MOST thing about this is that the music industry is stuck in the 20th century. Even before Warner Bros. yanked the videos they blocked the videos from being embedded. Music industry executives have no clue how to navigate web 2.0 and instead of adapting heavy handed responses such as this draw anger from their artists and push customers farther away.