This week I’m trying something new. Until now I’ve been embedding YouTube videos for each week’s Monday Metal entry. This practice worked well for quite a while but an increasing number of videos, especially old songs that remain in the iron grip of ancient authoritarian record labels, cannot be embedded on third-party websites. This made placed continuous restrictions on the metal that I can present and those restrictions have reached a point that I find detrimental. In the hopes of being able to bring you a wider variety of metal again, I’m going to experiment with Vimeo.
This week’s entry is a class, Stargazer by Rainbow. I couldn’t embed this song via YouTube but ran into no issues embedding it via Vimeo. Hopefully it works for all of you. If not, let me know what issues you’re experiencing and I’ll see if I can fix it.
Not that I think getting away from YouTube is a bad idea, but in my research I’ve found it is mostly (or at least partly) YouTube complaining about things like EFF’s Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, and in particular some of the things you can do via FireFox in about:config to short-circuit tracking and ads. Buy YMMV.
WordPress is pretty good about most of the standard video feeds, and they can/will handle new sources if you can get the folks in charge of that “new source” to work with them a bit. (I’ve not had much luck on that score….)
Still, that’s why I’ve started putting links to vids in the posts, because they keep jerking everyone around.
In this case it’s not any privacy protecting tools that are causing the problem but copyright holders deciding that their content can be shared on YouTube but not by third-parties via YouTube. Most of the newer copyright holders don’t have this attitude thankfully but a lot of great metal is held by old copyright holders that haven’t adapted to the changes brought by the Internet.
Truth be told, I’ve wanted to migrate away from YouTube simply because I don’t like its parent company. However, YouTube has by far the largest selection of music of any video hosting site so it’s difficult to go away from it for the Monday Metal entries.
Oh, and keep up the good work. Heavy Metal seems to be dying in America. Though I blame the record labels more than anyone. (They can only produce something that is exactly the same as the last thing they heard.)