As I’ve mentioned before Vevo is being built up to become the “Hulu of music videos” and it definitely has a strong shot of doing just that. With the launch roughly 30,000 videos will be hosted on Vevo, but the crazy part is HD videos won’t be available till next year. I don’t understand that… What is kind of cool though is Vevo will include synchronized and integrated lyrics and there won’t be a preroll ad every time you watch a video, ads will be served based on aggregate usage.

Speaking of ads on Vevo… All ad inventory and sales will be done directly through Vevo and they’ve already put together a strong roster of advertisers including: McDonald’s, AT&T, Nikon, Dove, Colgate-Palmolive, Mastercard, Axe, Infiniti and Stoli. These advertisers will pay a near premium rate of around $20 to $45 for every 1,000-page views, Vevo Chief Executive Rio Caraeff said in an interview.

Vevo will certainly be a nice little income stream for the declining record companies, but Bono thinks it’ll be a little more than just a little income. At the Vevo launch party tonight Bono said on stage: “We are here to launch the great cash cow that was the music business. But we are also here to celebrate a new model for the music business. It’s also a great vehicle that will allow fans to go behind the scenes with their favorite artists.”

What’s really going to determine the faith of Vevo will be the partnerships Vevo is able to create with not just record companies, but also other media companies. One step in the right direction is that both AOL and CBS are joining the Vevo music network and Warner Music might be signing up to join soon.

It has potential that’s for sure… two companies in particular should be worried, MTV and MySpace. MTV needs a huge strategy and focus shift and stop pretending it is the premiere venue for music videos and MySpace has made a huge shift towards music and Vevo’s launch definitely won’t help them succeed…. survive.

Owen Van Natta – Current CEO of MySpace, previously Chief Revenue Officer of Facebook and former CEO of Project Playlist
John Sykes – Current CEO of Project Playlist, co-founder of MTV, former president of VH1 and former CEO of Infinity Broadcasting
Nada Stirratt – Current Chief Revenue Officer of MySpace, former EVP of MTV’s digital ad sales
Jason Hirschhorn – Current Chief Product Officer at MySpace, former Chief Digital Officer at MTV
Ali Partovi – Current SVP of Business Development at MySpace, former CEO of iLike
Hadi Partovi – Current SVP Technology at MySpace, former president of iLike

The current strategies for Facebook and MySpace are obviously pointing in two different directions… Facebook is concentrating on “social communication”, while MySpace goes after the “social content” market. MySpace looks like they want to be a place where you share content like music and videos to people who share similar interests. Personally I think it’s their only hope, but I don’t think it’s going to be successful for them in the long run unless they severely cut their current efforts in the social space and concentrate fully on the entertainment industry. There is no way they’ll be able to do it alone either, it’s going to involve a lot of partnerships with sites like Google and Facebook… yes Facebook and MySpace. MySpace’s acquisition of iLike was interesting as roughly 30 million Facebook users are using iLike on their Facebook pages. MySpace also teamed up with Google Music to bring music more directly into search results allowing users to listen to songs and even purchase them. Google’s entrance into the music world is a whole another story… I think Apple saw this as a major threat into “music discovery” and hence the purchase of Lala. Apple definitely wanted Lala’s technology and developers as Apple takes another step towards “Music Anywhere”… definitely advancement to taking music to the cloud for Apple.

One thing can’t be missed… MTV is losing good people left and right and they’re gonna be losing the music game soon… if they haven’t already. If MTV assumes they’re above all this and that artists will always turn to MTV first then they’re in for a big surprise. MTV hasn’t been exactly sitting back in all this as they’ve launched MTVMusic, but let’s just say that wasn’t a very good launch. Personally I think music is a battle MTV shouldn’t fight… there’s just too much money companies like Google and Apple will spend to dominate this area. Plenty of other areas in which they can dominate, they’re definitely an influencer, but with this generation it comes with their programming, not music.

I miss being involved with the music industry… can’t wait to see how this all plays out.