Filed under: Audio, Blogging, Google
Google plays the heavy for record labels, targets bloggers
The problem is, some of the people sharing songs are doing so at the request of artists and their promoters. That's the case with Ryan's Smashing Life, whose story has been picked up by LA Weekly and Rolling Stone.
In November, some of Ryan's posts began disappearing. There were no takedown notices. The posts were not unpublished. They were unceremoniously deleted without warning.
What's going on behind the scenes are the same idiotic practices that have plagued the music industry for ages. The promoters push material to people like Ryan for publicity without talking to corporate muckety-mucks. The suits get mad, and blame the little guy. Google hosts the content, so the labels order them to grab the intellectual ballbat and make with the kneecapping.
In Google's defense, surely there's something in the Blogger.com TOS that permits this sort of thing, but these actions don't do anything to further Google's friend-of-the-people image.
Ultimately, though, it's the bass-ackwards business model of the music industry that continues to frustrate and inconvenience the rest of us who just want to listen to our music.
[ via Inquistr ]