The future of "Sounds of 2012"

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few weeks, and possibly even if you have, you'll probably have heard about YouTube creators' concerns regarding new rules. The signal:noise ratio has been quite poor, but the thing is now starting to have tangible effects for our community – for example, Sim Gretina briefly made all their videos private. Though that decision has now been reversed, it may only be a temporary stay of execution, depending on how things pan out in practice.

Although it's hardly the most important bit of fallout, it does have a bearing on "Sounds of 2012", since the vast majority of songs I feature are found on YouTube. True, some of them are also available on artists' Bandcamps or similar, but a lot are not – and for all the reasons I've mentioned before, I'm not usually keen on embedding videos from third-party re-uploaders unless I'm fairly confident they have the original artist's blessing. (Or unless they're stupidly famous.)

I'll keep a watching brief for now and see how many YouTubers do decide to blank out their channels. I suspect it won't actually be a huge number, but I do think it may include some big names – as we're seeing here. I also suspect that the implementation of the new rules in practice won't quite be as terrifying as some are suggesting. I mean, how many people actually take much notice of the penalties listed in the type of software EULA that's existed for decades?

Of course, that the obvious way to make sure you keep access to these videos is to download them from YouTube while they're still there – something that is itself in breach of YouTube's existing regulations, even though nearly everyone does it. Why does life have to be so ironic?