Being in the middle of a national promotion campaign for a record launch in 2 days, I've been required to self-google several times a day to catch radio station playlists, review posts, etc.
Today, I've been watching Google/YouTube post scores of title card videos of my songs, without consultation or permission.
YouTube is (apparently badly) launching its music stream service and my digital gateway (CD Baby) is currently set to allow streaming. What YT is doing, though, is posting full length title card vids within YouTube itself, meaning anyone with YT download/conversion software will have a free and open vault of my and thousands of other artists' work until YouTube figures out just how they're going to stream.
So far, I've been filing copyright takedown requests and sending messages but to no avail. Even sat on hold for two hours (a chipper, 20something voice warned, "Hey, we're really busy today, so hold times could be over an hour") before being robotically informed they simply couldn't take my call and told support documents could be found at google.com.
Spoke with the folks at CDBaby, who said I'd have to cut off all streamers to make it stop. The problem is, other streamers, however minuscule their payments, aren't laying out a free lunch of my shit in such an easily rippable form.
Most infuriating, perhaps, is that nearly all of these songs already have produced, original videos made, on YouTube, monetized, making money with ads (money of which I've never seen dime one). Videos that were produced to enhance the value of the tracks.
I know it's all a racket, that musicians aren't supposed to get paid anymore, that we're simply here to provide our work for whatever people want to use it for and grovel for the .000001 cents a play, but this is just incompetent.