Why the music industry hates itself, part two (try watching the Grammys TODAY)

Presumably NARAL - whoops, I mean NARAS - wants people to know about their awards and how wonderful all of their music performers are. But they don't make it easy.

As I noted in a post that I shared this morning, the Grammy awards are broadcast live - if you live in the eastern half of the United States. If you live in the western half, NARAS would prefer that you lock yourself away from the Internet for three hours, and THEN watch the Grammy awards on tape delay.

But, as Peter Kafka noted in a post this morning, it gets even more ridiculous.

The official Grammy site, run by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, has plenty of clips, but none from the CBS broadcast itself–it’s all backstage, or red carpet or other footage I don’t care about. CBS.com doesn’t have anything, and neither does TV.com, CBS’s mini-Hulu.

Meanwhile, Google’s YouTube, the place where I really expect to see clips, is doing a very good/frustrating job of keeping the site scrubbed free of amateur uploads. You can find some stuff, but it takes work, and the quality is poor, and I’m pretty sure it’s getting removed quickly after it goes up.

So not only were west coasters such as myself forced to wait three hours to see the Grammy awards - it turns out that was the only time that we could have seen the Grammy awards.

Way to go, NARAS.

So if I wanted to see how this danged egg thing actually played out, I need to rely upon the people who tweeted about it.

At least until NARAS and the RIAA try to shut Twitter down for distributing copyrighted material.

P.S. It's illustrative to compare the entertainment industry with the sports industry. Sure, the leagues put up some roadblocks so that I can't watch a Redskins game any time I want, but at least all (well, most) sporting events are shown live no matter where you live. Can you imagine the furor if the Super Bowl organizers decided to delay the west coast feed for three hours?

And, unlike awards shows, there are certain sporting events that you can see online, for free. As I noted in an Empoprise-BI business blog post last Friday, I could have watched the Lakers basketball game on ESPN3 had I chosen to do so. ESPN3 could have gotten my eyeballs and could have bombarded me with online commercials.

But apparently that's too edgy for NARAS. Maybe Grammy winners Jethro Tull could talk NARAS into it.