After Warner Music Group forced YouTube to remove all of its music from the site back in January due to a dispute over royalty payments, they have made their way back on YouTube. Not just like that, the re-entry goes hand in hand with extensive branding, full custommade backgrounds and links to purchase the artist’s products. On top Warner has been allowed to sell its own ads against its own music videos AND and the user generated content that features Warner songs. The majority of the revenue goes to WMG with YouTube taking a (small) cut.

It remains to be seen if other labels will be able to do the same. Users have already been protesting against these changes which ‘abolishes’ uniform layout on the site. From a label’s point of view the move is only logical since YouTube is gaining fame (and money) from the ’stolen’ content. That YouTube is not exactly making money is secondary in this matter.

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10 million people watched the live stream of U2’s concert on YouTube. The streaming of the two and a half hour show was handled by Akamai (and not Google) who also took care of YouTube Live past summer (with up to 700,000 simultanuous views). The recorded version of the full concert is now available on YouTube and has already reached over 1,350,744 views.

In the meantime, Foo Fighters are to to stream a concert on Facebook. The live concert will be aired from the band’s very own Studio 606 in Los Angeles. The live video will be powered by Livestream.

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The London-based company TubeRadio.fm has launched a service which lets users create YouTube playlists. Yes, you read it very well, TubeRadio.fm is turning the video sharing website into a music streaming service to organise music videos and share playlists over email, Twitter or Facebook. Here’s what the company itself has to say about its service: “It’s the internet music video player. Think of it as iTunes meets YouTube meets Spotify. It’s absolutely free and there’s nothing to install.”

One wonders why YouTube/Google didn’t come up with this in the first place.

Users can on top add a band’s discography in just one click. While a song is playing, users can access tabs with extra information such as lyrics, artist biographies and suggestions for other albums they may like.

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U2 is streaming their tonight’s concert right now from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California live to YouTube. Although Techcrunch says only 16 countries are able to view the show live (Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, U.K., U.S.), you can add Belgium to that list. The show is live now at www.youtube.com/U2 .

For those using Twitter, YouTube added a Twitter widget below the video player displaying tweets from people using the #U2webcast hashtag. In addition to streaming the concert, YouTube will also put up the entire recording on its U2 page tomorrow.

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Add to this the option to have a mini label store integrated inside the video using Google’s Checkout as payment module. They still are nowhere with Checkout as far as market penetration and mass (micro)payments for music purchases can make the payment module better known. (It can also be a counterproductive, noone I know has used Checkout, me neither, but that aside, they just have to buy PayPal instead ).

YouTube is loosing money at a fast pace of millions of dollars per month. To counter this and rake in a few millions extra to fill the pit, the Google owned videohub has improved its premium ‘Promoted Videos’ feature. Promoted Videos gives you the possibility to expose your video to other users, whilst paying for it that is. Not only has the platform gone through an integration with Adwords, Promoted Videos can now also be used/ordered in Canada, France, the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands next to the US.

As far as the music business is concerned however, an integration with a(n existing) downloadstore would be more than welcomed. Views and sales are still two different things and when it comes to indie labels, they are far more interested in getting an ROI which is measurable instead of branding a video in the hope of getting some sales out of it in the future. Indie labels want it here and now and they are right thinking so, they don’t have the budgets the major have and cannot live with the hope that the people having watched the video will remember the band, let allone the title of the track when they hit a store, on- or offline.

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