Recording Industry Still Does Not “Get” Technology

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At last night’s Grammys, they kept calling it “music’s biggest night.” But for those who wanted to check out some of the performances the next day, you’re out of luck.

The reason: despite providing live webfeed, despite scheduling a per-telecast event to hand out the, um, less interesting awards so that the actual telecast can serve as more performance than award-giving, the Recording Academy has not posted a lot of videos of the actual performances.

Instead, they have posted video highlights of some of the artists’ acceptance speeches.

And they’ve posted a whole lot of photos from last night’s Grammys.

And though the Recoding Academy honored Steve Jobs about music industry leaders who passed away since last year’s Grammys, it appears that the Grammys still don’t “get” technology.

Even as the videos the academy did post included the ability to share and embed those few clips, it did not post any full-length videos of the performances.

Photos may be nice but they don’t provide any sound. Yet aside from Lady Gaga and Niki Minaj (accompanied by a faux Pope), I’d think most people would be interested in the video to be able to see and hear their favorite performers.

The Emmys provided a plethora of video highlights. The fact that the Grammys did not suggests that they don’t understand the power of social media to allow fans to share video. I understand copyright issues and concerns, but by enabling people to share links of their favorite performers at the Grammys might provide an additional boost to the entire industry.

The advertising industry certainly saw a bump after the Super Bowl because so many advertisers had a launch strategy that included social media.

Instead, fans going to YouTube saw either a message that content had been taken down because of copyright concerns or they saw clips that were titled as Grammy 2012 performances when those clips had been posted as long as two years ago. That kind of confusion in the marketplace seems more damaging to the Grammys’ and the performers’ brands than having the Grammys post videos of the actual performances (not highlights).


Seems to me the recording industry missed an opportunity to provide its customer base with protected content they could share with other fans.

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