I was browsing SPIKE (formerly known as iFILM) and came across the video for Billy Joel‘s song We Didn’t Start The Fire. It’s a pretty good song but a really good video and the quality is fairly good for a video sharing site:
Upon closer inspection, I noticed that it had been uploaded by mtvmusicvideos. So I click on the MTV Music profile and I get a page featuring the latest Jason Fox video, Aunt Jackie, which I can’t embed.
I’ve ranted about content provider’s refusal to allow embedding before, so I won’t belabor the point except to say that MTV is trying to have it both ways. I also found a bunch of Eurythmics videos that are embeddable:
So it appears that MTV’s online music video marketing strategy is to restrict current artists and recent releases while allowing embedding for past hits.
Isn’t the point of music videos to promote new artists or new songs? Doesn’t the refusal to allow fans to embed those music videos into their blogs and MySpace pages defeat that purpose?
Is Viacom worried that allowing embedding would discourage sales of music and/or music videos? It’s a reasonable worry but not a very realistic one.
It seems to me that the opposite is more likely true; that allowing embedding would drive more sales.
And so it goes…
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