YouTube Music Video Biz: Offline Viewing, Finding Collabs & Sponsors, Fixing Content ID

YouTube has become an important part of the music industry and music videos are a huge part of YouTube. Now YouTube is planning to introduce offline viewing absent internet access and Vevo, for one, is opting out. For those seeking collabs on YouTube or sponsors for one's channel, FanBridge introduced Channel Pages to help you out. And, in news that may one day directly affect you, Audiosocket has developed a solution for license identification when your music is used by others.

YouTube to Offer Offline Viewing

Last week, in a somewhat cryptic statement, YouTube announced the upcoming ability to watch videos offline. As AllThingsD clarified, that offline viewing would be through a YouTube app and videos would still contain ads.

However, only Google-provided ads will run and, obviously, annotations won't be usable until the viewer is back online. Content is automatically enabled but you can disable offline viewing at multiple levels including individual video, country or all videos.

For some music video content owners, this will be fine. For others, not so much. Vevo has already stated that they will opt out.

FanBridge Introduces YouTube Channel Pages

FanBridge recently announced their new Channel Pages service. Channel Pages are designed to help you connect with other channels for collaborations and with sponsors for support.

As FanBridge notes, collaborations are a big way that YouTubers cross-promote so Channel Pages offer a way to faciliate both marketing and monetization.

If any Hypebot readers try this out, please let me know how it goes.

Audiosocket Offers Content ID Fix

Whatever they say about their technology, the plethora of services now offering musicians ways to monetize others' use of their music on YouTube are relying on YouTube's Content ID to identify music. However a wider range of services exist to help content rights owners identify music on the web often leading to takedown notices.

Unfortunately these systems can be faulty and, even when correctly identifying music, don't have an up-to-date history of licensing.

Audiosocket's LicenseID is designed to move beyond content identification to focus on the identification of licensing:

"LicenseID (LID) instantly embeds a unique inaudible tag into audio files as part of the licensing process. LID delivers usage information to rights holders on where and how tracks are used, and gives video-hosting platforms the tools to know when a video has properly licensed music."

It's a smart idea but one that will require a lot of buy-in to succeed let alone become an industry standard. However Audiosocket has already announced Source Audio as an initial partner.

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Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch/@crowdfundingm) also blogs at Flux Research and Crowdfunding For Musicians. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.