Archive for: remove

Performing Rights Society Force YouTube to Remove All Music Videos for the UK

There has been a lot of talk overnight about YouTube (owned by Google) not being able to come to a royalty deal with the PRS in UK, thus leading to all music videos being removed from YouTube effective immediately. Here are links to the statement about the situation from YouTube and the PRS.

I don’t want to just run through what many other sites and news sources are writing about, I wanted to discuss why a solution didn’t happen and what is going to happen next to both the PRS and YouTube.

YouTube and the PRS couldn’t come to a royalty deal mainly because the PRS were asking for a lot and they were providing no real information in return. The PRS were asking for blanked royalties but weren’t able to specifically say what artists would receive the royalties and what amounts they would receive. YouTube stated the following:

“PRS is now asking us to pay many, many times more for our license than before…we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback. In addition, PRS is unwilling to tell us what songs are included in the license they can provide so that we can identify those works…that’s like asking a consumer to buy an unmarked CD without knowing what musicians are on it.”

It is kind of like the PRS just expected YouTube to meet their demands no matter what they asked. In addition, on the PRS statement for some reason they mentioned Google’s last quarter revenues for 2008 in which have completely no relevance in this case. The PRS still seem to be using old methods to try to force companies into agreements that just simply aren’t realistic in this current economic climate. Remember that Pandora is not in the UK anymore because the PRS couldn’t offer them a decent agreement and forced them to basically close up shop in this country.

This leads me to believe that there is now a potential for YouTube to launch a spinoff site as already reported with all four major labels, which will attract high levels of advertisers and also possibly sidestep old music companies like the PRS.

Organise Your iPhone and iPod Touch Apps into Folders

No I know what most of you are thinking, why the hell isn’t this an iPhone app or why hasn’t Apple done this already, well they should have! The Next Web is reporting on a new app that is really going to help.

It’s an awesome app in Cydia called “Categories” which lets you organise your apps into folders. The app provides an array of different icons you can use, you can easily rename folders via the app and adding/removing apps is relatively easy. However, this is not available in the app store and you need to have your iPhone jailbroken.

Currently, on my iPod touch I have over 5 pages worth of applications that I use on a monthly basis. At the moment I’m having so much trouble keep track of the apps and actually arranging them so they can be easily used and organised. Apple needs to come up with an app like this, either that or they need to be able to arrange your apps directly in iTunes.

One limitation: the app doesn’t recognise iPhone web apps only genuinely local apps.

As I noted above, this is only for Jailbroken iPhones. Other features which Cydia (jailbroken app database) brings is copy & paste, 5 apps in the dock amongst hundreds of others.