In artist-land, it's unethical to not give artists the services they want on the terms they want. Because art is the most important thing in the world.

I know that sounds sarcastic, but it's actually how a lot of artists behave and speak.

To clarify, this has more to do with controlling distribution - most artists want to retain ultimate control over when they can choose to terminate distribution.

To add a firsthand story, I am a part of an online music community, OverClocked Remix (http://ocremix.org ), that had to craft a formal content policy agreement for legal reasons to protect itself in the event a game publisher/rights owner decided to sue the site for hosting rearranged music from one of their games (the site only sells officially licensed music - the rest is free), or if an artist imposed many fickle demands such as 5+ artist handle change requests or a sudden takedown request of a track, which would affect distribution methods such as torrents. The site solicited feedback from the community, and we came to the decision to require a non-exclusive right to distribute with an identifier of our copyright (meta information in ID3v2 tags and the file name), no DRM), while the artists would maintain full rights of their track. Termination of distribution is left at the site's hands.

A few artists balked at this, and expressed strong disagreements based on the view that artists should retain full rights over distribution. They ultimately signed and most, even those who complained, ended up content with it.

> In artist-land, it's unethical to not give artists the services they want on the terms they want.

It's extortion. So your characterization is flawed. When videos are not popular, unsurprisingly, you aren't selected to be extorted.