On behalf of Ace, I apologize for our absence of late. We've been busy. Very busy...
Busy bringing spectacularity to the world!
And apparently someone else has been busy, too — busy scaling walls and jumping on cars and down stairwells and onto conveniently placed gymnastic bars in beautifully lit parking garages. I speak of Little J herself, Ms. Taylor Momsen, seen in the video above escaping a horde of paparazzi (Aaaaaand no) by masterfully channeling her inner Nastia Liukin.
The star of Gossip Girl — the greatest thing to happen to my TV since Zack Attack — is also filmed sporting a totally inconspicuous pair of not-at-all-fluourescent Nike tennis shoes.... that Ace suddenly must have.
"First it was MTV, then it was Apple, and now it's YouTube..." (Source: Reuters).
...So begins the latest Reuters article on Warner Bros.' probably-very-boring battle with YouTube over licensing fees for its music.
As this story develops (see earlier post here), the questions that come to mind are mostly along the lines of:
Do the labels really have anyone to blame but themselves for lagging so far behind the curve on this one? For not anticipating the rapid changes in Web-based technologies during the past 10 years? The past five years, even? Especially given that they had a fairly early heads-up in the form of the original Napster?
But then I stop and remind myself that I never in my wildest wet dreams imagined that something called a Google would one day make my life so much easier (and me, so much lazier).
And I guess it's probable that, like me, the suits over at Warner and Universal and Sony — who also has quietly begun removing its artists' videos from YouTube — don't have engineering degrees from MIT or masters in CS from Illinois. So, like me, they probably naively assumed that it couldn't get any better — or worse, in their case — than Kazaa and Morpheus!!!
(Oh, college... ;-)
Alas, in the end, there's still a pretty big difference between those music execs and me: they have — er, had — money. Money to invest in R&D. In new talent (backstage; not just at the mic).
But instead of spending it on developing ways to monetize online file/content sharing, they wasted it all on pursuing petty lawsuits against your idiot college roommate who simply forgot to deactivate the upload option on his Limewire install.
Meanwhile, other smarter people were heeding the lessons the music industry refused to acknowledge, and as a result, you and I are now part of tiny little movement called Web 2.0. Together, we're proliferating the Web with so much content, the record execs can barely keep up with what we were doing last week, much less what we have planned for next year! So what do they do now?
Well, like the Reuters article said, "...and now it's YouTube."
TBC
- Blitz
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