The tale of one 16 year old's attempt to work with the music industry.
The story of David Nelson, the 16 year old co-founder of Muziic.com, vs. the Goliath of major label backed video site VEVO is entering a new phase. Last week Nelson used YouTube's openly available API to add VEVO music videos to his music discovery site. But VEVO and YouTube (who shared the same API) were not pleased and issued a terse statement condemning Nelson's seemingly legal actions. A day or so ago VEVO pulled its videos from the YouTube API.
Nelson shared his side of the story with Hypebot earlier this week and now adds this update:
As soon as I realized that VEVO videos would be available on an embeddable, API-accessible basis some months ago, I wanted Muziic to be the first third-party website to offer VEVO content. And, as mentioned, I was very surprised to find that there were no advertisements being streamed via the API.
Some reports imply that Muziic stripped out pre-roll advertisements, ripped VEVO streams, etc. What happened was really quite simple...
VEVO decided to allow its content to be accessible in the YouTube API - without ads - much of it available worldwide. I saw the opportunity to innovate using an open platform to create a unique user experience … so that's exactly what I did. In doing so, Muziic did not violate any of the terms, policies or guidelines that we are held to as users of the YouTube API.
At this point, I feel that VEVO would prefer we put this situation behind us, and I respect that. My focus has always been to develop the best music service I can. Muziic wants to fulfill the needs of music lovers wherever they are - whether they are using mobile devices, desktop computers, the web, social networking websites or by any other means. While we welcomed being able to offer VEVO content, it's only a needle in the haystack of YouTube music.
David J. NelsonMuziic CTO / Co-Founder
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