Warning: Thanks to Sony Music Entertainment you will not want to watch this video

I've recently been watching the 3rd series of a comedy called How Not to Live Your Life on YouTube. If you haven't already seen it then do, if only for the final episode of the series in which there's an amateur dramatics production of Top Gun: the Musical.

Oh and it also guest stars Noel Fielding from the Mighty Boosh and contains references to Penge. What's not to like?

Here's a little sample...



Yes that's right. The video has no audio. Thanks to Sony Music Entertainment (Don't worry though, you can watch pretty much all of the rest of it here)

I actually managed to watch the video somewhere else and in one of the party scenes Rock the Casbah by The Clash plays in the background. The Clash happen to be signed to Sony Music. Bye bye sound.

The last time I came across this was when I was watching the BBC4 documentary Krautrock, a brilliant and engrossing as much about the rebirth of German culture after WWII as the amazing characters behind Kraftwerk, Can and Neu amongst other bands. But be warned. Sony, in their wisdom, have requested the removal of the sound from the final part of the film because it contains a snippet of a David Bowie song.

So having already invested 50 mintes of my time I was left feeling seriously let down.

This kind of behaviour by Sony is so counter-productive it makes me want to go and download the entire Clash back catalogue just on principle (I don't need to because I pay a monthly subscription to Spotify).

The most stupefying thing is that Sony are actually paying someone to police videos on YouTube and piss off potential customers. It's like they're intent on running their business into the ground rather than adapt a new media landscape.

I've actually met people who work for Sony who recognise that there's no real future for the music industry if they keep on acting on tired old notions of ownership. But unless the people at the top get that too, they'll lose out to newer rivals who get that the rules have change about what constitutes value in the music industry.