Quote Originally Posted by VAisforEagleLovers
TAPOT sounds more like Don than TOF.
Time to learn some new acronyms, I see! lol They're both terrific!

I'm glad Don's utilizing social media. By putting the songs on YouTube officially, it heads off those who would do so without permission at the pass. People typically click on what comes up first in YouTube search, and now that will be the official uploads.

Even more importantly, Billboard now includes official YouTube views in their estimates of a song's popularity. When a music entity like that is taking YouTube into account when ranking songs, the artist better take it seriously.

Most importantly of all, it's a revenue stream for the record company. Even if you put aside the interest and sales it generates, they get paid per view. If he refuses, they lose income. I doubt he was given much of a choice. However, I really don't think he had to be forced. He must have realized how selfish it would be to make others lose money in order to promote his own personal anti-YouTube agenda. He is still free to have his people take down all the unofficial stuff, after all.

Yes, he's railed against YouTube as the enemy of musicians in the past, but that was years ago. It's got all sorts of features which benefit copyright holders now that it didn't have then; the artist can even earn money from fanvids and unofficial uploads via YouTube's content matching system nowadays. This is automated and doesn't require the artist to find it; as soon as you upload the song, YouTube detects the song via the content matching program, adds a link to where it can be purchased in the video description, and monetizes it for the copyright holder. (An example of a monetized fanvid is here, for the curious - all those links were added automatically as soon as it was uploaded). He doesn't have to like YouTube to recognize its benefits.

I imagine that his record company enlightened him as to what an asset it could be and that his Billboard ranking as well as his wallet (and more importantly, their wallets) would suffer if he doesn't do it.

Don has a lot invested in getting this album heard. He's an intelligent man and although he's old-fashioned, he's presumably not going to cover his ears and shout "LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" when told about what he can gain from modern technology.