Warner Music is working with Premium TV to create an online site featuring the record label's entire music video library. The service will be supported by advertising, and the videos will be available to stream for free. You'll be able to download videos for a fee.

While you can currently access some Warner content from the label's website, the deal would include Warner's entire library, plus previously unseen content.

As CD sales continue to decline and online video continues to grow in popularity, the move seems to make sense. But most music fans don't really associate artists with the labels they're on. In other words, even if Warner posts its complete catalog, there's a good chance you wont' find the artist you're looking for on Warner's site.

It'll be hard to compete with existing sites such as YouTube or MTV's Overdrive that have videos from multiple labels.

[via I4U News]

What do you do if you've got an internet radio station, but the future of online radio is murky? Add video, of course. Because no content owners have ever demanded much of internet companies that offer video.

Last.fm plans to add video to its site this week, allowing users to create custom music video channels much the way they can currently create custom music stations. The music will be encoded at 128kbps, which is twice the bitrate of music videos on YouTube.

The company is partnering with a group of major and independent record labels, so there shouldn't be any lawsuits to worry about. But with the copyright royalty board seeking significantly increased fees from internet radio stations, how long will it be before sites like Last.fm also have to pay exorbitant royalty rates to deliver music videos online?

Now that Pandora is unavailable outside of the US and UK, where do you go for your streaming music recommendations?

Aggrega wants to be a sort of Pandora for music videos. You enter an artist and it will pull up videos from that performer and others it thinks you might like. You can improve the recommendations by clicking "I Love" or "I Hate" buttons for each song.

But here's the problem. Aggrega grabs all of its music videos from YouTube. In other words, you'll wind up with a lot of fan-made music videos of kids lip-syncing songs or amateurs performing covers. The service also brings up a fair number of videos that have been removed, which shouldn't be surprising since many of the actual music videos posted to YouTube are done so without the consent of copyright holders.

As YouTube continues to crack down on copyright violations, it's likely that Aggrega could become even less useful unless the service uses videos from other services or actually gets distribution rights for the videos it serves up.

Another thing that's kind of annoying is that Aggrega will show you a list of upcoming videos, but it won't let you skip ahead to listen to those songs, and it doesn't always play them in order.

[via Mashable]

Ah when the river of Google flows, it is plentiful. Not even sitting down for a breather, the big G has announced a deal with Sony BMG and Warner Music Group (yea, they shook hands with YouTube last week too) to bring "thousands" of free music videos to GooTube Google Video, thanks to their standard ad-supported model. They have plenty of videos linked front and center under their search box from big players like Madonna, Justin Timberlake and John Mayer, with a promise of more on the way.

It's going to be real interesting how all this Google Video, YouTube and copyright stuff pans out. Warner's aforementioned plan with YouTube showed some forward-thinking on the company's part to embrace these new distribution mediums instead of threatening them - it looks like these new post-YouTube acquisition deals, now with Sony on board, could be a sign of the times.

The rumored Google-YouTube acquisition we talked about last week might imminent--perhaps as imminent as later today, according to the New York Times' DealBook blog. DealBook's Andrew Ross Sorkin writes, "Barring a last-minute snag in the talks, the boards of both Google and YouTube were scheduled to hold separate board meetings on Monday to approve the deal, with an announcement possible after the close of regular trading." Michael Arrington's scoop about the merger talks last week reportedly accelerated the schedule for Google's negotiators, who feared a third party swooping in and disrupting the $1.6 billion deal.

In related news, YouTube struck some major media deals today, inking agreements with CBS, Vivendi's Universal Music Group, and Sony BMG. CBS, which already runs its own Innertube video site, will have a branded channel on YouTube starting next month featuring short-form content. The Vivendi deal will put thousands of the record label's music videos online, much like the Warner Music deal reached last month. Likewise, Sony BMG has agreed to put some of its videos online. All three media companies will be sharing advertising revenue with YouTube and allowing Vivendi and Sony BMG will be allowing YouTube users to incorporate the music video content into their own videos.

YouTube has made some surprising progress in its quest to host every music video ever created in a deal with Warner Music that will put the record giant's entire music video library online. This is in stark contrast to the recent legal threats by Universal against YouTube regarding copyright. The Warner deal gives YouTube users access to the music videos plus the green light to remix those videos with their own content. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but Warner and YouTube will be sharing advertising revenue.

Universal Music has accused YouTube and MySpace of infringing on the rights of their artists music videos during an investors conference. Universal's chief executive stated that the two companies owed them tens of millions of dollars in copyright infringement money. Universal is expected to release a statement about how they will deal with the infringers in due time.

YouTube has been known to take down copyright related materials when they have been notified by rights holder. It should be interesting to see how this pans out. The greatness behind sites like YouTube is held in the mass video appeal, from personal videos, to artist music videos. Take the music, and music videos away, and what are we left with? This could cause a little bump. However, what if YouTube and MySpace were to pay per view for each music video played?

In Universals Chief Executives speech to investors, he did state that record companies are keen at avoiding the mistakes that were made when MTV was set up, by letting artist's music to be aired for free, creating a multi-billion dollar company in the process.

YouTube is on a quest to add a massive music video library to its extremely popular online database of videos, and is asking major labels to work with them. YouTube has been in talks with major record labels about posting their archives of music videos in their service. This is a drastic, but reasonable move away from a site where people share their own videos, moving towards a more mainstream approach providing professional content.

The co-founder of YouTube Steve Chen spoke about how in 12-18 months he would like to have every music video ever created accessible on YouTube. The big way that YouTube will differentiate themselves is to offer the service for free, and not charge like much of their competition (iTunes, AOL, Google and Yahoo) does.