Prince vs. Radiohead

An interesting post here about Prince’s behavior on YouTube. Many people don’t know this but Prince is a Nazi on YouTube.  Anything about him, any song, any mention and he issues a takedown notice.  None of his songs are on YouTube.  This hurts the Qloud experience, so obviously i know about it.

But things got interesting this week.  At the Coachella music festival a few weeks ago Prince played the Radiohead song Creep.  In the world of YouTube, Radiohead is the complete opposite of Prince.  They put lots of their stuff online for free (including an entire album) and even have their own YouTube channel.  So when Prince tried to take down postings of his performance of Creep YouTube is caught in the middle.  Prince doesn’t own the rights to the song and in fact during a recent interview Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke was quoted as saying, “Well, tell him [Prince] to unblock it. It’s our…song.”

I like the battle.  I can understand Prince’s strategy of trying to create scarcity of his product to it doesn’t get dilluted or played out, but i love Radiohead’s strategy of putting all their stuff out there for the world to hear and play with.   Who’s side are you on?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FutZukovyAQ]

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