The Red Frown Face, and What It Cost
The screen goes black and a red frown face appears, and I feel something that sits roughly between genuine hatred and the urge to throw something out a window. Someone sent a press release. A friend shared the link on Facebook. Every music blog in the world had already embedded the video. And here I am in Germany, staring at nothing, again.
The YouTube-GEMA standoff had been grinding on for years by 2012. GEMA—Germany’s music licensing and royalty collection body—and YouTube couldn’t agree on what YouTube should pay per stream. YouTube’s response was to preemptively block any video where GEMA held rights. Which was most of them. Which was effectively all of them, any time you actually wanted to watch something. The red frown became the unofficial symbol of the German internet: yes, you’re in Germany, no, you can’t have that, carry on.
Running a blog about pop culture from Berlin meant watching counterparts in every other country embed whatever they wanted while I begged management contacts to please also upload the video to Vimeo. In HD, ideally. Usually they’d get around to it two weeks after the cultural moment had already passed—after everyone had found some roundabout workaround or caught it on a music channel. The timing was always exquisite in the worst possible way.
Sony Music’s Edgar Berger was at least candid when asked directly. His position: It lies not with us. We have licensed our content to market participants. Direct that question to GEMA, which licenses copyrights very restrictively. We are losing millions in revenue because of this—it is one of the main reasons digital music commerce is so underdeveloped in Germany.
He also predicted, with the quiet confidence of a man watching someone else’s building burn, that GEMA would eventually arrive at economic necessity. He wasn’t wrong. They finally settled in 2016. Four years away.
YouTube blamed GEMA’s demands as unreasonable. GEMA said they were protecting artists. The labels said they hated the situation but had already licensed their catalogs. Everyone pointed at someone else. The people who just wanted to watch a video got the frown face.
My frustration was never really about picking a side in the licensing dispute. It was about a system designed—however accidentally—to make culture inaccessible in the name of protecting the people who made it. Artists whose videos were blocked were losing more in reach and exposure than GEMA was gaining in theoretical royalties. The bureaucratic logic of it could make you want to invent new profanity. All I wanted was to watch the thing, write something about it, share it here, and move on. The black screen didn’t protect anyone. It just made everything harder than it needed to be.