Youtube Channels Suspended, New Christmas Song

Remember how in my previous post I posited that one of my youtube channels with millions of views and thousands of subscribers might serve as a new outlet for my own music? Not only was that true to some extent and actually a really good idea, now it's an impossibility as BOTH my channels were terminated just days before Thanksgiving. First they got my hugely popular channel and then took down my personal Exit World music and creativity channel as well.

I know who is responsible for it but I am not sure of the extenuating circumstances behind it. See, on this widely popular channel called JustGoodStuff I had many clips of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" programs that were well over 40 years old. They had been up for easily over a year or longer. I began uploading some clips after the 2 Twitch marathons that were broadcast in 2017 and 2018. I had recorded many of the shows while they were airing during those marathons. These clips were very popular and well-received. They were not necessarily the reason for the explosion in popularity of this particular channel. That was attributed to some Tim Conway & Harvey Korman clips from the Carol Burnett Show that I had compiled. My original plan had been to put together and upload 4 of these compilations at about 15 minutes each to resemble a game. The clips all featured Conway & Korman breaking character as a result of doing unscripted bits and lines. I think it only took about 2 months before the first video compilation hit a million views. The second video was uploaded shortly after the first and went the same way in terms of views. When my channel was suspended on Monday the first video was at over 2 million and the second at over 1 million. I have never had any videos do that well.

Those 2 videos along with an earlier Conway/Korman video I had uploaded and a segment from a 1973 episode of "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson also led to this channel getting an extraordinary number of subscriptions per day. In fact, I was actually annoyed at my phone going off so frequently with emails stating I had new subscribers all the time. 

It is possible that these videos and subscriptions played a part in the large number of views I was getting on the Mister Rogers videos as well. I'm not totally sure. There has been a lot of Mister Rogers stuff going on the last 2 years due to what would have been his 90th birthday, 50th anniversary of his show and 15th anniversary of his death. Not to mention the documentaries and movies that have been coming out about him as well.

So those videos were getting plenty of views and comments as well. Nowhere near what the Conway/Korman & Carson videos were getting but still a good amount of traffic. I was at 8150 subscribers and one of my most recent uploads was my own rendition of "Ding Dong Merrily On High" & "Gloria in Excelsis" which I combined into a medley and called "In Excelsis Medley". Within the 3 weeks it was up it had received over 200 views and had 9 likes with no dislikes. I would have never gotten those kinds of numbers on my own Exit World channel. So my initial conclusion had manifested. 

I also had a crazy thought. Why shouldn't I check to see if this channel could be monetized. No harm done, right? I mean, I wasn't getting my hopes up. I knew that most of the content on there was not mine but I was putting it together in unique ways or adding my own background music to some videos. I was almost certain they'd say no.

About a week or so after making the request sure enough the expected response came in. "No, you cannot monetize this channel." OK, at least I know for sure now. A few weeks later and all my work is gone. All the hours I'd leave the computer on overnight to upload a longer video trampled on and invalidated.

One more thing to consider: in the last 2 weeks youtube started talking about this thing called COPPA which is supposedly something that's 'meant to protect children.' Now every time you uploaded a video you had to check a box that declared that your video was either made for children or not made for children. Honestly speaking, I didn't like how the choices were worded. If you choose 'not made for children' does that mean your videos may be considered inappropriate for them and then you get unwanted special designation on the videos? And if you choose 'made for children' you're catering to them? So needless to say it was rather confusing. I decided the best choice for me was that my videos were not made for children.

Last week a number of my Mister Rogers clips were taken down and I received 2 copyright strikes. I wondered why they chose those particular videos and left all the others. I also wondered why I received one copyright strike for a single video and then another one copyright strike for 6 other videos. That didn't make a lot of sense. But I was still in the game. I had one more strike to go. I figured they didn't take down the other Mister Rogers videos for whatever reason so I left them up as well. And youtube had said that if I went to their 'copyright school' those 2 strikes would expire in 3 months. So I did it. All it is is a short cartoon you have to watch and then answer 3 questions about copyright that are discussed in the animation. I did it and passed and in 3 months I would be back to no strikes. Just to let some of my subscribers know though, I made one video with some of my own background music and some lines of sentences that basically let them know the position I was in and the chance that channel could vanish at any given moment.

And voila! On Monday morning I was informed via email that I received a 3rd copyright strike for the remaining Mr. Rogers videos that were still up and that my entire channel had been taken down. I know for a fact that there is no way to reinstate a channel that has content you don't own on it. So the milestones of subscribers and millions of views for the unique content that I had uploaded were all erased. What I was trying to most figure out was why. WHY NOW? I suspect the request for monetization of the channel could have had something to do with it. Also this COPPA thing. And the current hype for all things Mr. Rogers may have played a part as well.

As much as it pained me to get my channel shut down by the company associated with the man I considered a personal hero and whose program was something I could never get enough of growing up and even later on, the pain was even more debilitating when on Tuesday morning I received an email stating that my Exit World channel was also taken down because it was linked with the other channel. This was my own personal channel for my own music and video creations. Okay, I may have had a few things on there that weren't mine as well, but they were few and they had been there since before I created the JustGoodStuff channel. There were never any issues. I had never received any copyright strikes for those. If you'll remember, that channel was even monetized for a while until they changed their standards to better serve the elite channels. 

Pissed as I was, I finished writing a one and a half page letter which I emailed to the Fred Rogers Company (FRC). I don't expect anything to come of that but I wanted them to know that what they did was a very much anti-Mr. Rogers thing to do and that he would never object to the content of his shows being online because he believe in sharing and in fair use.

There is a possibility for me to get my Exit World channel back up but I have to appeal and send in this form to youtube or google or whoever the hell it is. I don't feel like doing it. I think it'll be a time-waster. They have the final say. Welcome to the free world. 

I had gone to a Mr. Rogers group on Facebook and announced what happened and said I was going to write the letter and asked for any ideas. This very un-Mr. Rogers-like group pretty much acted as my judge and jury with an immense amount of self-righteousness and undoubted hypocrisy. One who had copyrighted images from the recent Laurel & Hardy movie (among other things) on his own Facebook had the gall to say that I deserved what I got for using what didn't belong to me! Another one mentioned the Fred Rogers Company's right to sue me! Sue me? For what? Good luck with that!

I have no doubt these accusers and naysayers spent countless hours watching the videos I uploaded. But now all of a sudden they are armchair copyright attorneys and defenders of the rights of intellectual property owners. After receiving a rash of comments siding with the FRC, I finally called them all a strange bunch--certainly they knew nothing of who Fred Rogers really was; many have just jumped on the Rogers hype bandwagon--and told those who supported what happened to me that they themselves better be obeying copyright laws by not watching anything that's been illegally uploaded. Because, after all, if you're going to be self-righteous, then you'd better be righteous yourself. 

So I am not sure what I'm going to do. This did put a damper on the Thanksgiving Day anticipation. My initial thoughts were to abandon youtube forever and not use it anymore for anything. (I refuse to capitalize youtube any longer). But they're like the ebay of the video world. Where else are you gonna go to build that massive viewership and potential revenue? I still do have my ExitWorldTopic channel (or TopicExitWorld, whatever it's called) but that's fully controlled by CD Baby not me.

Most importantly for me now is to finish and release the new Christmas song I've been working on. I'd love to have my own channel to upload the video to but it's not an option at this time. When it's done and released I'll get it up on Vimeo and Soundcloud and wherever else I can find. Oh, and of course, ChristmasSongsRadio.com. They play my stuff and that might be the best place to get it promoted. By the way, the song is going very well and I should be done recording it in no more than a few days and then mixed and mastered and released with artwork. 

A New Avenue for My Music?

I have discovered something interesting. Other than my Exit World YouTube channel I do have another one that has a couple of videos with a million plus views and over 7,300 subscribers at the moment. The high number of views and subscribers happened this past spring when I created some compilation videos of a TV show. I had no idea I was going to get this sort of response. In fact, my first million-view video happened within just 4 weeks of uploading it. It is now at over 2 million and my subscriber count has skyrocketed from what it was before this video.

My discovery is this: anything that I upload to this channel immediately gets views and likes. Some of course get a lot more than others. But I have decided that I can use this to my advantage. I will upload some of my own original creations on this channel. Not the 'from the archives' material but my better quality material.

I have done so today. I uploaded my "In Excelsis Medley" recording from a few years back onto this channel and in about 12 hours time it has 75 views and 6 likes. There is no way it would have anything even remotely close to this on my Exit World channel. So it will be interesting to see where this goes and how many views it will have by Christmas. This may even be a way to get some sales for my music, though at the particular moment this track is not available for purchase anywhere.

I did not just upload the song, however. I took the cover of the Christmas EP I released some years ago and added some animated snowfall to it. A good visual helps promote any audio recording.

That's one bit of potential good news. In another bit, I was working on another instrumental song to use as background music for some videos. But the song was turning out so well that the thought came into my head to write some lyrics for it and turn it into a Christmas song. So I've been working on that and that's the route I'm going now. This will be a holiday tune perhaps for a single release or an EP release if I can get a few more songs recorded within the next 4-6 weeks or so. But I am really excited for this song particularly since I haven't made any new songs this year with the exception of the 2 that served as background music.

From the Archvies: Better Bass & Stereo Recording

The 4th track I have uploaded to YouTube is one inspired by a 1967 song by The American Breed titled "Bend Me Shape Me." It's particularly influenced by the verse part of the song. The instruments used in it are the Casio PT-1, rubber band bass, can drums and some seed pods as shakers. I never titled this recording either but for the sake of the uploads and these blog posts I'm calling this one "Bending Shaping".

You'll notice a few things different about this recording vs. the previous three. First, the bass is a lot more definitive and powerful. Second, the recording is in stereo.

I mentioned needing to find a way to get a better bass sound from my rubber band checkers tin instrument. Well, what I did was take a speaker that I had from somewhere and attached a 1/8" phono plug to it. I had no proper tools at the time so every connection ever made was shoddy and dodgy and led to intermittent and crackly operation. I still have this speaker in a box in the garage and I need to pull it out to take photos. But this is what I used. I would take the speaker and attached it to the back of the tin via the rubber bands and it would stay in place. The phono plug end would go directly into the mic jacks on whatever device I was using to record. I say 'whatever' because by this point I had purchased a small home stereo system complete with AM/FM radio, a single cassette deck and a record player. Perhaps more importantly, this system had two jacks for left and right microphones which leads to my next point.

The ability to record in stereo was very important to me after noticing so many of those hard-panned stereo recordings of the 1960s. I loved that the songs were mixed with bass and drums on one speaker while guitars and keyboards were on the other. Or sometimes bass guitar was on one side and drums were on the other. At other times many of the vocals were isolated on one side so I could choose to listen only to the instruments. I thought that was fantastic. So I wanted to do the same. This particular recording of mine was in stereo with the bass instrument and drums on the right and the keyboard and seed pods on the left.

Sometime around 8th and 9th grade I purchased the aforementioned stereo system. Probably closer to 9th grade. As mentioned, this system had a single cassette deck so I was not able to do overdubs on it. I still had to use my sister's boombox. So what I would do is record a couple tracks using her boombox and then play those back with a mic right at one of the speakers and play something live into the other mic and record all that into my new system. Of course, I would make sure that whatever I was playing live was some physical distance away from what was playing on her boombox in order to avoid microphone bleed. I wanted as much stereo separation as possible. But I was also limited by how long my mic cables were and how loud I could play anything there.

I'm pretty sure that "Bending Shaping" was a 3 track recording. I believe the first track was the drums, second was bass and third was the Casio PT-1 and seed pods simultaneously. The Casio had the ability to record anything you played on its keys. I would put it on the record mode and then play it back via the memory play button. One thing I discovered on my own--this wasn't even in the manual--if I pressed one of the small colored buttons before the memory play button, what I had recorded would play back 4 whole times. I don't remember which button caused this but it was a great discovery to me. It allowed me to have the keyboard play by itself while I played something live at the same time. Thus, in essence I could record overdubbed tracks playing back from the boombox, the Casio playing by itself and anything I wanted to play live all at the same time. However, that would require some nearly precise timing and sync on the part of the overdubbed tracks and the Casio; needless to say I didn't do that very often.

From this point on, many if not most of my archive recordings will feature the new bass sound and a stereo soundscape. I continued to dabble in mono recordings, however due to the fact that my sister's boombox offered portability which meant I could record anywhere. My new system with the stereo mic inputs stayed in its designated place most of the time and I moved it only when I intended to do serious recording. And there was an anomaly with this new stereo system--the cassette player seemed to operate at a slightly higher speed than normal so anything I recorded on it and played back somewhere else sounded slower. That would make for terrible pitch matching depending on the order things were recorded.

So that's the story behind this particular recording and some of the 'advancements' made during that time. Those were highly experimental days.