David Emery Online

Lily Allen Shows Off Newish Song, EMI Shows Off Newish YouTube Strategy

3 December 2008

Usually when a new track makes its way to the Web, YouTube fills up with unauthorized rips of the track, featuring visuals that are promo pics (sometimes stitched together with your Windows Media Maker wipes, often static) and maybe the lyrics on the side. They’re also embeddable, so people (cough cough) can stick them on their blogs, or what-have-you. Parlophone decided to beat the YouTubers at their own game, though, creating an embeddable video that not only streams the song, it gives details on how to preorder the album.

You know what, this actually is a pretty good idea. I’ve been championing for a while the idea of having an easily embedable song player – I’m looking at you, Last.fm and Hype Machine – and this is a pretty good pass at it using the already existing YouTube architecture. Would be nice if the audio was nicer quality though.

What makes this doubly interesting is that EMI are almost certainly a YouTube partner, so will be receiving ad revenue from these YouTube plays…