Posted by Ann Bernard

YouTube announced on Monday it launched a Symphony Orchestra.  This is both an interesting twist for YouTube and to the classical music world.

Here is an excerpt from the Washington Post:
The YouTube Symphony Orchestra revolves around two main goals: the creation of a mash-up performance of a symphony from video submissions; and second, a live performance of the same symphony (written for the occasion by composer Tan Dun) at Carnegie Hall on April 15, 2009, with about 150 players selected on the basis of their YouTube video submissions.

In short, YouTube is offering a new twist on the familiar formula of how to get to Carnegie Hall: Practice, practice, upload.

The idea, launched by two YouTube employees at an offsite retreat about a year ago, is being greeted enthusiastically by the classical music world, which Tim Lee, one of the project's initiators, tactfully described as "hungry for innovation."

Classical artists and administrators at the New York news conference Monday visibly basked in the glow of what, in their world, is the equivalent of being noticed by the cool kids at recess. Besides Carnegie Hall, YouTube's partners on the project include Michael Tilson Thomas (who will conduct the Carnegie Hall performance), the London Symphony Orchestra (whose players have already posted 24 master-class videos on the YouTube site) and the pianist Lang Lang.

Read the entire story

Who Will Actually Benefit?!?
The obvious benefactors are the classical artists who participate…this is an opportunity of a lifetime for those who will be selected to play a New York’s Carnegie Hall in April. What about Youtube and the classical music world?

Will YouTube benefit and will the Classical Music World Benefit?!?!
Lets start with who picked up the story...we have The Washington Post, The New York Entertainment Magazine, The National and plenty of other art type publications along with a few bloggers across the web.  The only stand out per se are Venture Beat and About.com.  Particuarly Venture Beat where you won't find too many stories related to classical music.

So who does those stories really benefit?  I'd say so far it benefits YouTube quite nicely.  The story is posted offline and online across publications and talked about by people who normally aren’t likely to include YouTube in their conversations.  People who more than likely don't pay that many visits to YouTube.

When and will the benefits kick in for the Classical Music World? Is there a glow to bask in?
Will people who have had no prior interest in classical music go to the http://www.youtube.com/symphony?? Let me say it “outloud” - YouTube dot com backslash symphony.

Go to YouTube.com – see anything there announcing the contest or the symphony area of YouTube?  Yea, I didn’t see it either.

How do you think this will benefit the Classical Music World?  What are your predictions? When the cool kids in school paid attention to the less cool kids...how did that ever pan out??

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Posted by Ann Bernard

Oddly enough this isn’t my venting session, but one brought to you by Brian Devine from New Media Strategies.

Brian’s annoyance is rooted in the counter intuitiviness of people choosing to disable embedding on their YouTube videos…as he goes on to say, here are two major problems with that:

“There are two major problems with a band disabling the embedding of its official content.  The first is that you are directly disrupting organic online word of mouth promotion of your content – this is contrary to the best practice of making your not for profit material, like YouTube videos, as easy to be shared as possible in order to maximize your reach.  

Secondly, disabling the embedding of official content you are encouraging the spread of unofficial content.  Locking down the videos on YouTube will ultimately not have the effect of forcing consumers to go to the official YouTube Channel – people online will find other avenues to embed and share the content in other places and ways.  This will cause disabling embedding to only be a short-term snag to those looking for the content that will really only be at the expense of the artist who didn’t need to disable it in the first place.” 

Brian ended venting with: “My only hope that this outdated thinking is the result of management, labels, etc. and not the band themselves. “

Here are two examples that Brian noticed and mentioned: Glasvegas video for Please Come Back Home and Morrissey video for Alma Matters

Until Brian mentioned this…it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would choose to disable embedding capabilities for their videos.  After all, two factors that make a video potentially viral: Good content and the ability to share the video.

Andrew Parker author of blog The Gong Show wrote a blog post on this topic almost two years ago to the date and these are his thoughts/opinions on why someone would disable embeds on YouTube: 

"YouTube must be paying a rev share for this content. Content owners likely don’t want their videos to be played if they are not paid for the play, and YouTube can only do a rev share on videos played on their own site (until they develop ads embedded in the video). So, disabling embedding is a natural conclusion from these circumstances. This is greedy. 

Another reason why content owners might want to disable embeds is they want to control the messaging around their video. Content owners like Domino Records want to stop users from presenting their videos along side offensive, insulting, or otherwise unacceptable material. This is less greedy, but still lame. 

YouTube is turning off the feature that allowed them to become the 800 pound gorilla in online video. It was MySpace and blogosphere embeds that let YouTube rocket past previously established competitors like Veoh. YouTube has reached a critical mass, so I don’t think disabling embedding for a limited number of videos will effect their growth at this point. But, it’s pretty odd that YouTube would allow owners to disable the feature (more so than any other feature) that defines YouTube."

Bottom line question that can’t quite be answered is: “Why would someone limit the ability for their content to reach a wider audience?” Any thoughts?

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