A few days ago word got out that Warner Music will remove all of its content from Youtube. There is a WSJ article here . It's likely that Warner wanted more money from Youtube and tried to renegotiate. Youtube, in the meantime, got tired of losing money on the content, so it refused the new terms. Minor loss for Youtube. Big mistake for Warner.

Now, Warner Music is a pretty big deal. They have some of the most popular and mainstream labels in existance. Their videos were no doubt among the most popular on Youtube. They were making a lot of money from these videos (upwards of 100 million dollars). But it wasn't enough.

Instead of making money on this, Warner will go back to spending money fighting piracy. And haven't the past 8 years shown how effective the record industry is in fighting piracy?

The fact is that all of these videos will simply reappear on Youtube. No matter how aggressive Warner is in it's copyright claims, no matter how many people they hire to send notices, the videos will come back. Users will be pissed off that their favorite bands aren't on the site, and will upload the videos. People will have to scroll a little deeper in the search results to find them, but in the mean time, Google won't be paying any money to Warner for these illegal views.

Also, for many people, Youtube is the new MTV. It can be a very effective tool for the music industry. Not only mindshare, but Warner could have leveraged Youtube to sell more albums with intelligent linking.

Instead, it's competitors will continue to reap the benefits of Youtube. I wonder how long it will be until Warner realizes its mistake and puts the content back up.