For me there are two fascinating questions about the Brand and Ross debacle.  Why did they put out the show with the item in when it wasn’t live and why did the furore gather so much momentum in such a short time over a week after the broadcast?

Why was it broadcast?  Any fool could have guessed there would be an issue and there were some very experienced heads in the approval chain.  I believe that the reason for broadcasting may lie in the fact that by recording the messages on an answer machine the comments were already potentially in the public domain.   With the social web anyone can publish and Ross and Brand realised that.  By not broadcasting they would have acknowledged fault and the recording could still reach the public via the web.  The evidence might be there is in their comments in the a part of the programme that was edited out of the final broadcast: 

Ross: “let’s both put on striped t-shirts and break into his house, merely to delete the answerphone message - let’s see what happens. What could go wrong?” 

Brand:  “Nothing, literally, nothing could go wrong as we smash our way into Andrew Sachs’s house”

Ross: ”break in like cat burglars tonight when he’s in bed”

Brand: “yes while he sleeps”

They must have felt that they had escaped censure when a week went by with no outcry but the press got hold of the story when Andrew Sachs complained.  It might have ended there but for the intervention of the social web once more.  The recording appeared on YouTube and there have been a million hits - somewhat more than the average listenership for Brand’s show.  As the hits on YouTube went up so did the complaints.  A week after the show went out there were just 69 complaints to the BBC at the last count there were more than 30,000.  A coincidence?  I doubt it.

Against my better judgement I listened to the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand radio debacle, not on the radio you understand but on Youtube.  To put this in context I should say that the Jonathan Ross show on Friday night is one of my few ‘appointments to view’ on tv these days.  I’m not a big fan of Russell Brand - he’s very clever, I like reading his column in The Guardian but I find him almost impossible to listen to. 

If  you are new to this story, on Brand’s Radio 2 Saturday night show, Ross and Brand left a string of offensive answerphone messages for 78-year-old Fawlty Towers star, Andrew Sachs.  They claimed, using slightly more direct language, Brand had slept with Mr Sachs’ 23-year-old granddaughter.What I heard of the excerpts from Brand’s radio show was not what I’d expected.  We expect the f-word from both Ross and Brand and that’s fine, we want sharpness but what I heard was akin to bullying.  What was really embarrassing was that it sounded very much like they were trying to outdo each other in terms of shock value.   It felt very much like Ross (47) was trying too hard to hold onto his crown as the emperor of edge and that’s just well…not at all cool. 

We want Jonathan Ross to be cool.  That’s part of his brand and we all pay a lot of money for it and I’m not sure I want to any more.

The MCPS-PRS Alliance, the organisation that collects and pays royalties to composers and songwriters, today reveals what the most successful songs on licensed websites were during 2007.

According to the press release, “the Alliance has managed to analyse 60 million downloads and streams of music on licensed websites such as YouTube, iTunes and Bebo, in order to pay royalties accurately to its 60,000 members.

Andrew Shaw, Managing Director of Broadcast and Online at the Alliance, said: ‘The trend for posting self-made videos is driving the number of performances on the websites we license. Hairbrush divas are not only helping to generate royalties for the writers of their favourite music but could also prove to have the X Factor themselves and be our stars of tomorrow.”

So websites that allow people to upload videos of themselves are having to pay royalties to the MCPS-PRS Alliance. That’s not royalties for footage of the original artist but videos of people singing along to their favourite songs…usually very badly.

Couple this with the news that the income from broadcasters and internet sites is up 13% to £82.3 million and you have to question the practice of charging websites royalty fees just so their users can share footage of themselves. It’s hardly as if anyone is going to avoid buying the artist’s new single just because they can watch a 17-year old dancing along to his favourite tune in his bedroom.

Of course you could argue that these are ’stars of tomorrow’ but if you can name an artist who has gone on to be a mainstream success after sharing their videos online, I’ll be impressed. And if anyone mentions the ’success story’ behind the Arctic Monkeys, you probably don’t work in PR!

Personally I’d like to see less ‘hairbrush divas’ singing along to their favourite tracks and more original music from high quality musicians. You can see the list of the most successful licensed songs below but if I were you, I’d just sit back and enjoy another helping of a true original - Chocolate Rain by Tay Zonday.

The most performed online songs 2007

1 BLEEDING LOVE Leona Lewis
2 CRANK DAT SOULJA Soulja Boy Tellem
3 APOLOGIZE Timbaland / OneRepublic
4 UMBRELLA Rihanna ft. Jay-Z
5 BEAUTIFUL GIRL Sean Kingston
6 GIMME MORE (IT’S BRITNEY BITCH) Britney Spears
7 HEARTBROKEN T2 ft. Jodie Aysha
8 ABOUT YOU NOW Sugababes
9 YOU ARE THE MUSIC IN ME (REPRISE) High School Musical
10 THE WAY I ARE Timbaland ft. Keri Hilson

UPDATE - Further information from the MCPS-PRS Alliance about how they collect information from YouTube:

“We have developed a method of distribution which pays royalties to a broad spectrum of members as effectively as possible.

Step 1 - where we have the necessary data from YouTube, our systems will automatically match music from YouTube videos to our members’ works.

Step 2 - after the automatic match, we then manually match as many videos to our members’ music as we can (up to the point where it stops being cost-effective for us to do so).

Step 3 - to allow us to pay the remainder of works which cannot be automatically or manually matched, we have developed a tailored analogy for YouTube’s UK usage in conjunction with Cambridge University statisticians.

We are working with YouTube to find ways of further improving identification techniques in the future.”

PR Week have covered Gordon’s foray onto YouTube this week. I think its the best thing he’s done, hot on the heels of Paddick’s Twitter, the key to politicians on social media is to recreate the old days, when people were actually able to ask politicians things live! And then they would talk back!

Since TV took over politicians have gone into ‘top-down’ soundbite mode and people are now massively cynical about it. So Gordon has got the medium and the principles right but it will still be Gordon and that’s the bit PR Week have quoted me on!

Seems Drew B didn’t quite have his full view expressed as well:)