It’s been nearly a month since I posted my last drum cover, and the busyness of work and life interfered with my goal of posting one drum cover per week. I was definitely anxious to get another one out there and build momentum, but with the YouTube copyright troubles this one has given me, my momentum is all but dead.
I went and covered one of my favorite Muse songs, “Time Is Running Out”. I nailed it in the third take and am now to the point where editing the video has become the easy part. I started the upload to YouTube only to find that my version got blocked in some countries – actually one country – the United States.
Confused, I searched for other drum covers of “Time” and found quite a few of them out there. On one of the more successful ones, I noticed that he raised the pitch of the recording. I went ahead and tried the same thing and made Muse’s Matt Ballamy sound like a woman, but I was hopeful that I’d be able to get my video posted. No such luck, it got blocked in the US again.
Frustrated, I was about to delete my video, but found that it was already getting a few views and even a comment from users in other countries, so I decided to leave it be. I’m trying to dispute the blocking on the video, on the grounds that this video is for educational purposes for other drummers, but I’m not too helpful that my dispute will be successful. We’ll see.
Look, I get that Muse’s record label and publisher is acting within their designated rights here, and that these drum covers are on pretty shaky ground. What sucks here is that there’s some kind of double-standard with the same freakin’ song. After already being burned by my Kanye cover, I’m pretty leery about putting in the work of practicing and recover a song, only to have it immediately flushed. Seeing the number of “Time” drum covers that I can see, I assumed that the labels saw this as a promotional vehicle for their music and were happy to collect ad revenue from the videos. It looks like I was wrong.
I guess for now I’ll stick to the more obscure songs or spend some time which researching which labels are cool about covers. However in the meantime, this process is royally broken. By the time you discover the end result, it’s too late and you’ve already wasted your time.
Luckily my original video has found a home on Vimeo:
Vimeo has a really nice platform and some great tools, and my video may still be up because of their “security through obscurity” model – but YouTube is where I’ve been trying to grow my channel. However, with half of my videos now crippled by these blockings – I don’t have much to show for it.