There’s been a recurring theme lately in the guitar and broader music community on YouTube.  Essentially it boils down to copyright and fair usage.

Two of my favourite online educators; Adam Neely and Rick Beato published videos a little while back discussing this in detail (videos below), but I’ll try to some up what they here from my own perspective.

In a nutshell, large corporate record labels are crippling online educators by overexerting their authority on content they own, to the extent that YouTube videos are being yanked despite only containing 30 seconds of audio in a ‘fair use’ format.

 

Fair Use

Now don’t get me wrong, I think music rights should be defended; but at what cost?

Playing music in the context of education comes under fair use.  It’s that simple.

However YouTube’s algorithms aren’t tuned to take this into account, flagging content regardless of context to the copyright owner.  In the cases mentioned below (and a ton of others) the copyright owners are major labels, and these labels are repeatedly requesting to have the content taken down, despite the fair use policy being in play.

Doesn’t seem so fair right?

So Why Should I Care?

No one starts out with this skill.

That’s why we need references, and thats why we need teachers.

Being shown how something works is an educational corner stone and music is absolutely no exception.

I really hope the major’s start to pay attention to this trend of take downs and start to show better consideration to these content creators.

 

Deconstructing Composition

No matter how you come at learning an instrument, and regardless of style, you need to be able to listen to music and understand what’s going on.  This deconstructive approach helps you understand how others have achieved certain things in their compositions and play technique.
This doesn’t mean needing to know theory in depth, or having the perfect ear it means listening to music enough that you can understand what’s going on

What’s Your View?

Are you a content owner?  Producer? Teacher? Publisher? Student?  I’d love to hear your take in the comments below!

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