Headline July 20, 2019/ '' 'YOUTUBE A-CHANGIN' *VIDEOS' ''

'' 'YOUTUBE A-CHANGIN' *VIDEOS' ''

YOUTUBE LONG AGO supplanted MTV as the primary venue for music videos, but it has recently seen threats to its dominance -

With the rise of ''vertical videos'' formatted for Instagram and Spotify -
and periodically it has contentious negotiations with record labels over the royalty rates it pays for each time a song is streamed, and whether that constitutes a ''value gap''.

So a project that burnished everyone's reputation was particularly appealing for YouTube. ''The entire industry can come together and do something great. There are lots of winners and no losers,'' said Lyor Cohen, YouTube's global head of music.

The music video for the 1983 hit single ''White Wedding'' featured a barbed-wire wedding ring, a motorcycle crashing through a stained-glass window and-

And the singer Billy Idol unveiling his telegenic sneer. Its director, David Mallet, said it was filmed in one day, like many of the clips he did then, and aimed for a display much different from those we're accustomed to today.

''We were making videos for a screen that the very largest was 32 inches,'' Mallet said in an interview, also lamenting that a lot of video work wasn't carefully archived.

As a result, YouTube - the place most consumers watch music videos today - still has plenty of videos represented by glitchy dubs off ancient VHS tapes. ''A lot of them just don't hold up when they get blown to 60 inch screens,'' Mallet added.

Now, YouTube and Universal Music Group have announced that they are upgrading more than  1,000 popular music videos to high definition, releasing them through 2020. Artists in the initial batch of  100 videos include Lady Gaga, Tom Petty, Boyz II Men, the killers, Lionel Riche, Kiss, George strait and the Spice Girls.

''Once the dirty coloring is removed, it's a lot more vital somehow,'' said Billy Idol, who has six videos in the first wave of upgrades, including ''White Wedding,'' ''Rebel Yell'' and ''Dancing With Myself''.

It gives videos a chance against the modern high-quality definition. And I'm forever that age in these videos - it's kind of fantastic.''

Upgrading the clips meant archival work with a dizzying array of formats. Barak Moffitt, the  executive vice president of content strategy and operations at Universal, named a few :
''We have sources coming from everything from original film to Digibeta, HDCAM to one-inch Cs  and Betacam SP to D2s - and the format it was shot in isn't necessarily the format it was edited in.''

Universal tried to remain true to artists' original intentions : 'The Beastie Boys' ''Sabotage'' looks so much crispier after its renovation, Universal contacted the group and the director Spike Jonze to make sure they weren't violating the video's aesthetic of cheap 1970s cop shows.

Moffin noted, ''The graininess of a tube television set, which is what they were going for, is not the dithery compression artifact that you can see on a highly compressed video, so cleaning it up went more to the  retro intent.

Sometimes detective work was required, as when the team discovered that the audio for Soundgarden's ''Fell on Black Days'' video was a unique recording made just for the clip. And  sometimes it was as straightforward as upgrading the audio to a better source.

Michael Nash, the executive vice president of digital strategy at Universal, that historicall, ''A lot of times, the first thing you were putting in front of consumers was the music video, even before the single went to radio. Very often a music video would be sent to MTV before the final stereo mix of the single was done.

When the Universal team showed Cohen a demo reel of their high-dimension efforts, they made sure it included ''Sabotage.''

'' I went into the studio and I saw the Beastie Boys, and I had a mind melt,'' he said.

The Honor and Serving of the latest Global Operational Research on Music, YouTube, Instagram and Spotify, continues. The World Students Society thanks author, Gavin Edwards.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the World. See Ya all on Facebook, prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - the  Ecosystem 2011 :

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