• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, September 15, 2006

So far it's been a busy month for online music.

MySpace.com said it's going to start selling digital downloads of independent bands and, possibly, large labels. Universal Music Group and EMI have said they're going to give away ad-supported tracks on the new Web service SpiralFrog. Apple introduced its latest iPod iterations, and Microsoft said it was getting ready to sell its own MP3 player, Zune--which lets users share songs wirelessly.

Yet, the music labels--which stand to profit enormously from these developments--still seem to resent the digital world. They continue to fear online piracy; even more, they appear to fear that other companies will somehow get rich off their roster of musicians.

Universal Music CEO Doug Morris complained at a Merrill Lynch investor conference this week that YouTube and MySpace owed the company "tens of millions" of dollars for copyright infringement.

Morris made clear that he doesn't want to see YouTube build its brand the way MTV did, with content owned by music labels. Never mind that those labels licensed the content to MTV; in retrospect, they apparently feel they got the short end of that stick because MTV became successful beyond anyone's imagination, while the labels themselves were left with mere affluence.

Morris specifically was referring to studio produced music videos that have ended up on YouTube. But even a quick glance at YouTube reveals very few such videos. In any case, the site's real appeal lies in the rare footage that was never before available to ordinary fans.

A search for "Green Day" leads to footage from a concert the teenaged members performed at their high school in 1990. Typing "Rolling Stones" into YouTube's query box turns up video shot at a concert in a park in 1969; searching for "The Strokes" yields a clip of the band performing on David Letterman in 2002.

Do those clips violate copyright law? Perhaps. But it's not clear that the record labels are the ones whose rights are being infringed on. And it's even less clear that the labels are being hurt by these clips--which aren't for sale in any case. On the contrary, the clips are the type of content that capture people's imaginations, and when that happens, casual fans turn into purchasers.