Damn.

Good things never last, do they?

Shazam - excellent and handy little number to have in your mobile. Hear a song that you like the sound of, in a shop for example, and you wonder what it is. No problems, just dial 2580, hold it up to the speaker for a few seconds (okay, this looks a bit stupid in a shop) and hey presto, you are texted back with the title of the track and the artist by Shazam!

YouTube - Also excellent. Host to millions of video clips, personal, home made and otherwise.

Google - used to be just a good search engine. Not anymore. Ohhh no.

Someone has to come along and spoil the fun, don't they?

Because of copyright legislation and all that malarky, it looks like they are going to go ahead with the merging of Shazam with YouTube to sanitise the site and free it of any copyrighted material.

It will do this by using Shazam's extensive database to detect music as soon as it's uploaded and GET RID immediately!

Future plans apparently include doing this with film clips, too.

So, the future of YouTube is looking bleak. We will no longer be able to even use music we like to accompany home made video clips as that will also be detected and taken down.

YouTube will become nothing but a sorry collection of mute versions of home movies. A kind of internet version of You've Been Framed. (Without Harry Hill commentary.) This will mean the end of music videos on YouTube. I don't think people realise the gravity of this situation.

Boo.

I realise that record companies etc have a point, but have they really seen a marked decrease in sales since YouTube's inception? I should imagine that illegal music downloading from other sources has hit much harder. Peer-to-peer file sharing still goes on and will do forever - but they can't do much about that.


Well, I'm off to download everything I can from YouTube using Firefox before they Shazam it.