It's incredibly obvious you have a dog in this fight and are incredibly biased. It's well known almost every recording artist gets screwed, and that it's easier to fight fans than their bosses. Take what you've written about startup youtube, and applied it to TODAY'S youtube, but flipped it to be 100000% anti-consumer, you'd be on the right track. Thanks to your record companies, I can no longer broadcast my gameplay if the game itself has coded-in music, because my video will get flagged as stolen content. If I'm recording a 3 hour video, and a friend walks in and his ringtone goes off and happens to be 4 secs of a song....I now have my entire video removed for content theft, though I've never done such a thing.

This all happened thanks to the Viacom lawsuit[1], which forced youtube to be the most pro-recording industry, and anti-consumer popular site ever. Now, an automated bot trolls everyone's videos for any knid of match, and if flagged the video is automatically taken down unless you file an appeal. In other words, guilty until proven innocent. Unless you are a record label, then it's innocent until proven guilty.

Did you miss the Family Guy fiasco[2], where they used a 7 year old video of Nintendo gameplay footage in the show, the bot saw it as "Fox Owned", and had it removed for copyright infringement.

The youtube era you describe was for a few months-years. We've been dealing with the bullshit youtube became EVER SINCE. Forgive me if the complaints of a record company insider (in whatever capacity you may be), falls on deaf ears.

This is reminiscent of Lars Ulrich complaining about Napster and the internet in general. Only even he admitted he was wrong about that.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-viacom-lawsuit-idUS...

[2] https://consumerist.com/2016/05/20/fox-swipes-youtube-clip-o...