I had the pleasure of spending some time with Rachel Botsman recently, whose book What’s Mine Is Yours comes out soon. Rachel’s approach is one readers of this blog will dig, looking at how the web is taking the notion of a global village and making it a reality via the services springing up that facilitate connection between people in more and more meaningful ways.

The above video does a much better job of explaining it than I do, so check it out (those reading on email should click through to watch, well worth it), follow Rachel on Twitter, and get ready to hear a lot more about the rise of Collaborative Consumption.

nickcrocker:

The official Lady Antebellum clip does not allow embedding. It has 18MM views.

This hacked up Lady Antebellum song has 11MM views. It looks terrible, but it’s embeddable.

I don’t understand why bands/labels/managers spend tens of thousands on putting together a clip and fussing over details of presentation only to disallow embedding.

If a craptacular fan video is generating 11MM views by being embeddable, maybe it’s time for labels and managers to disable disabling embedding?

Nick raises an interesting point, one faced in a very public way by OK Go! a few months back (it’s worth reading the whole post, but here’s a snippet):

…(the labels)…got all huffy a couple years ago and threatened all sorts of legal terror and eventually all four majors struck deals with YouTube which pay them tiny, tiny sums of money every time one of their videos gets played. Seems like a fair enough solution, right? YouTube gets to keep the content, and the labels get some income.

The catch: the software that pays out those tiny sums doesn’t pay if a video is embedded. This means our label doesn’t get their hard-won share of the pie if our video is played on your blog, so (surprise, surprise) they won’t let us be on your blog. And, voilá: four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our bassist’s glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and 5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for EMI, we’re – unbelievably – stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared. It’s like the world has gone backwards.

This is what gives us our current situation: fans have trouble getting the music heard as widely as possible, so they do cheap versions of clips to fly under the radar so they can embed them on their blogs, Facebook pages, whatever.

I imagine from the band’s point of view that if they miss out on the trickle of revenue from a clip but add a hundred people to a show, 10 of which buy a t-shirt, they’re kinda OK with how that plays out. Meanwhile the labels are trying to ensure they get artists locked into 360 degree deals which involve the labels getting a slice of the touring and merchandise revenue, which doesn’t foster additional good will between two parties who have always been at odds with each other.

The crux of the issue is the music industry’s business model has failed to keep pace with the rate of change in a way that makes it feasible to continue doing what they’re doing. The ramification of this is two-fold: firstly, far less bands get signed. Secondly, labels are far less willing to take a punt on something they’re not sure will hit (cue Justin Bieber).

There’s a third thing I’ve neglected of course, that the internet has taken away the physical impossibility of reaching the world in one fell swoop. What the labels still offer, for better or worse, is immediate cut-through.

Those of us who are (somewhat) satisfied to simply share clips of ourselves playing at home however, manage to find a way to stay sane.

(And unlike the labels, I’d like it if you shared that.)