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Key YouTube music man steps down

By | Published on Thursday 24 July 2014

YouTube

One of YouTube’s main music men, Chris LaRosa, is departing the video streaming giant to go and join one of those trendy start-ups you have these days.

LaRosa has been with the Google subsidiary for seven years, and played a key role in the expansion of music content on the video platform, and in managing the firm’s relationships with the music companies, including getting YouTube stats to count towards the Billboard 100 singles chart.

And more recently, of course, he has been involved in YouTube’s somewhat delayed attempt to move into streaming audio with a Spotify-competing subscription-based music offer. You know, the one for which YouTube has been trying to strong-arm the indies into agreeing to less favourable rates by threatening to withdraw their video-monetisation privileges.

There was speculation yesterday that LaRosa’s departure would further delay the launch of the new YouTube music service, though Google has denied that is so, confirming it has a whole department of people dedicated to screwing over independent labels, musicians and songwriters, so the screwing can continue unaffected without LaRosa’s hands-on guidance.

Well, what a Google moogle actually told Billboard after the Wall Street Journal claimed that LaRosa’s exit created “yet another hurdle for the long-delayed

project” was this: “It’s a loss and he will be missed, but there are several people, senior and frontline, working on music. We’re not that concerned from a product perspective”.

No word yesterday as to what start-up LaRosa is joining, except that it is being led by a “long-time associate”. I bet it’s a game-changing, disruptive, ephemeral, frictionless, curated, fully immersive gamification of something though. That’s a no-brainer.



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