On Thursday, millions of her Lady Gaga fans who flocked to YouTube to get their daily fix of her Ladyship were met with the message – “This account has been suspended due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s Copyright Policy.”
Much to the glee of her fans, by late Thursday, Lady Gaga’s account had been restored. So, what went wrong?
Reportedly, the performer-singer’s YouTube account was suspended because her account hosted footage from her recent appearance on the Japanese show ‘SMAP x SMAP on the Fuji TV network.
The issue arises from the reason that Lady Gaga failed to secure digital rights to display the performance of popular Japanese boy band SMAP, who perform besides her in the SMAP video.
On Monday, Gaga tweeted her excitement about the SMAP performance, writing, “My performance+cooking show appearance on SMAP SMAP is airing now in Japan. Kawaii Monsters!”
The surprise element is that YouTube Policy is to remove accounts after three copyright violations, which was not observed in this case.
Apparently, Media Interactive Inc, which has allegedly been behind some other Japanese musical removals from YouTube was responsible for Lady Gaga’s account suspension.
 Lady Gaga |
In the clip which was being circulated before suspension, Lady Gaga emerges from an ornate box wearing a an elaborate black dust mask and sings “The Edge of Glory” before sitting down at a piano housed in a giant bejeweled hand sculpture for a solo take on “You and I” that morphs into the album’s title track.
The suspended account, “ladygagaofficial,” is one of two for Lady Gaga. The other, unaffected account is run by Vevo. The Vevo account which has more than 1.6 billion views, generally debuts her music videos. Vevo co-owned by Universal Music Group and Sony Entertainment is a music video platform and also distributes videos on YouTube.
Lady Gaga has long been the Queen of YouTube. Her videos have racked up more than a billion views on the site and fans have flocked to it in droves to post their personal takes on her outfits, fashion, music and videos.
On her Twitter account, Lady Gaga talks about recording a wonderful duet with musical icon – Cher. This would be a alert notice for her millions of fans who will look forward to seeing Lady Gaga-Cher video on YouTube.