Sony thinks so. The company, which owns the rights to Beyonce’s wildly popular, award-winning music, has pulled Beyonce’s videos from her YouTube channel, citing copyright infringements.
When fans reach Beyonce’s YouTube channel, they’ll get to see an ad for the House of Dereon, a banner congratulating the artist for winning six Grammy awards, and links to her most popular videos, including “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It).” Click on that last link, which won MTV’s Best Video of 2009 and a Grammy for song of the year in 2009, and you’ll get a message reading, “This video contains content from Sony Music Entertainment, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.” Sony’s move to pull the video is the first time a record company has blocked one of its own artists. A move that may seem counterproductive as Beyonce’s channel gets millions of hits, with “Single Ladies” leading the way.
You can still watch the “Single Ladies” video and others with Beyonce: they are perfectly accessible on Sony’s own channel, Vevo. Sony appears to be trying to contain the viewership to its own channel. A post on Gawker.com says that the move, “Defies belief. Until you realize record companies are ridiculously out of touch, scared, and would much rather get back to selling 12-inch vinyl from record stores and snorting expense-account coke with the bands in hotel suites like the old days.’
Apparently, Beyonce’s official channel became Vevo in December; fans are more puzzled about why Sony or YouTube didn’t provide a simple redirect to the official site instead of issuing a warning for each video, which does nothing to guide users to Vevo.
Incidentally, this week, Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s video for “Telephone,” broke a record: it was the first video to have over 1 billion views (even Twilight clips didn’t quite break the billion mark). To have any confusion surrounding Beyonce’s videos would seem to be coming at a bad time when searches for her songs and videos are at a peak.
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