YouTube has a new feature that should be of particular interest to labels & artists. You’ll have to work out who owns the copyright if you have a label contract.

In the past, if someone else used your song as a “soundtrack” for a video they uploaded to youtube, you had only two options. You could ignore their use of copyrighted material, or you could petition Youtube to block that video. Now there is another option.

Youtube as implemented a Content Identification and Management System (Content ID). The system allows copyright holders to provide YouTube with video or audio reference files which they will then match against user uploaded content. If a video matches the profile of your copyrighted content (video or audio), your preselected action is taken.

Your options for each copyrighted piece are these:

1. block any new content using this piece
2. track stats on any new content using this piece
3. monetize any new content using this piece

Monetizing it doesn’t mean that you get paid each time the video is viewed. What it does mean is that YouTube will place an overlay ad on the video with the title of the song, the artist’s name, album name, and a “Buy Now” button that links to the viewers choice of iTunes or Amazon.com.

If you’re a rights owner this might be something you should look into.

Here’s an example of an overlay ad in a user uploaded video. This video is about Spanish basketball player Ricky Rubio. It contains a song, by an independent artist, used as a background soundtrack. About 10 seconds into the video the ad appears, at 25 seconds the ad minimizes.

Similar links are starting to show up in some artist music videos as well. This recent YouTube blog post gives some more info on the program.

Chris Sharp may be best known for his work on the Grammy Award winning O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, or his years spent touring with the late John Hartford. What you may not know is that this accomplished guitar player is also a dedicated instructor.

Sharp is making it easy to take advantage of his interest in teaching guitar. He recently uploaded close to a dozen instructional video clips to YouTube. The video segments are each 10 minutes or less in length, respecting Youtube’s 10 minute length limit per video.

Addressing the rhythm style of Lester Flatt, he covers everything from tuning, to chord shapes, the thumbpick-fingerpick pattern inherent to Flatt’s style, and more. The most recent video, number 8 in the Lester Flatt series, tackles the E Chord and Flatt’s rhythm pattern for the tune Six White Horses. It’s a little out of the order he had planned to present the material in.

After getting several emails specifically asking about this pattern I bumped it up in the original outline for how these videos would proceed. The “Six White Horses” pattern is one of Lester’s staple patterns and I believe this is very close to what he was playing and hope this video will be of assistance of any who wish to learn it.

Shot with an HD camera, the videos are well done with studio quality audio. If you have the bandwidth, I’d suggest you click the “watch in HD” link under the video. Doing so will present you with a large and very nicely encoded High Definition version of the video. My Verizon DSL played them back flawlessly without hesitation.

If you enjoy the videos, be sure to visit Chris’ website and purchase a CD or t-shirt to help support his efforts to provide this kind of instruction for free.

Here’s the Six White Horses clip.

Were you to find yourself visiting an outdoor arts festival in Italy this summer, would you expect to run up on a bluegrass band?

If you were in Bologna recently, you might have found Bononia Grass performing on the street for a crowd of appreciative listeners. The guys got some video from the festival, and posted it on YouTube.

Band members include Giovanni Stefanini on mandolin and lead vocals, Paolo Ercoli on dobro and vocals, Gian Luca Naldi on banjo and vocals, Giovanni Zordan guitar and vocal, and Pedro Judwkoski on bass.

Luca shared few words about the band and playing bluegrass in Europe.

“We have having fun, we are working hard to become better. You know, bluegrass music is not simple to play and we are determinate to do it HONESTLY (not something similar). It’s already a miracle that five Italian guys are still a unit after all these years, but we love what we play.

At North Wales festival we have had the good luck to meet Greg Cahill and his band, Special Consensus. It is so important to see and listen to a great band like them. And Greg is a super fine picker and person. Just in time because we were really depressed at that time.”

You can find out more about Bononia Grass by visiting their web site or MySpace page.

With more than 75,000 music lovers in attendance – a great many with video recorders of some kind – it should come as no surprise that dozens of videos shot at Merlefest 2008 have popped up on YouTube.

Of course at such an eclectic festival, the offerings range from old time bluegrass…

…to more experimental string music…

… to the truly bizarre.

See them all on YouTube.