You may be wondering where today’s Van Halen instrumental is. We’re sorry to say that we’ve got some bad news. The band’s record company removed them from YouTube, and they will not let us post any more of them. So that’s the end of it.
We admit we are surprised, because evidently they don’t have a problem with any of the other Van Halen content that’s on YouTube. A YouTube search for “Van Halen” pulls up over 1 million videos — including, of course, all the band’s officially released songs, all their complete albums, all their unreleased songs, all their official music videos, all their official live concerts released on both audio and video, all their isolated tracks culled from the Guitar Hero game, etc.
But apparently, having Van Halen songs without vocals is where they draw the line. It’s just too incendiary and mind blowing for the general public to handle.
Years ago, record companies usually tried to remove unauthorized versions and videos of their music off YouTube, but it was like playing Whac-a-Mole, as new versions pop up almost immediately. But in recent years, with YouTube’s ad partnerships, record labels have discovered a better solution: monetizing them.
That’s why we were eager to share these instrumentals with other die-hard fans, thinking their record company would treat them just like they treat all other Van Halen content on YouTube. Just leave it up for fans to enjoy, and collect ad revenue. Everybody wins.
Unfortunately, they decided to pull the instrumentals, for some reason. Fair enough. That’s their prerogative. They own Van Halen’s songs, so they have every right to delete them from YouTube if they want.
We apologize that we got people excited for a new VHND feature that we won’t be able to continue.
But try not to be too bummed. We’re still sitting on tons of great Van Halen content for the future that we haven’t even dug into yet. We’ll start getting to it more once the holidays are over (we’re having to spend most of our time right now on Van Halen Store as opposed to VHND, during the Christmas season). We’ll continue to post cool articles and videos as usual throughout December, but you’ll notice we’ll have a bit more frequent content starting in January.