Music Video Redundancy and Half-Life in YouTube

YouTube is the largest, most popular video digital library in existence, and is quite possibly the most popular digital library regardless of format type. Furthermore, music videos are one of the primary applications of YouTube. Based on our experiences of linking to music videos in YouTube, we observed that while any single URI had a short half-life, music videos were always available at another URI. For this study we collected 1291 music videos and found that very few had zero or one copies in YouTube at any given time, and some had several thousand copies at any given time. Furthermore, individual URIs had a half-life of anywhere from 9 to 18 months, depending on the publication date and remaining commercial potential.