Iman Jalali

Through the last few weeks Vevo has started to show its true colors more and more. It’s becoming quite apparent that Vevo was not built for the fans, but it was built for the industry to help with the monetization of music videos that are spread on so many different content providers. Since the 80’s music videos were merely a marketing piece used to help fuel a musicians album sales, basically think of it as a TV commercial for a new show. As costs of music videos have grown into the hundreds of thousands of dollars record labels have started to consider music videos as “premium content”. While it is still considered a marketing piece to promote an album, labels are now even more interested in monetizing these videos and cashing in on the internet views of these videos.

The goal of Vevo is to basically create one funnel from which videos are provided and by controlling that funnel they can control not just the user experience, but also control all the ad sales. The ad sales is the reason why Vevo was created… it wasn’t created to be the ultimate source of music videos for the fans… the ultimate music video fan experience… it’s attempting to be the ultimate cash cow for the music industry. By providing one venue for these videos Vevo is able to charge anywhere between $25-40 CPM(cost per thousand impressions) to advertisers compared to $5-10 CPM.

If this all plays out the way Vevo CEO and President Rio Caraeff wants it to it’ll be a huge win-win for the industry(labels/artists) and Google/YouTube. Oh yeah… about those fans… um the industry blames you for their demise and you owe it to them to visit Vevo 200 times a day… I’d love to ask Mr. Caraeff a few questions about the future of Vevo… I’ve got some ideas that can make this a win for the fans as well.

I’ll leave you with something I found interesting… so Vevo had their launch party last week in NYC and Rihanna was there helping Vevo promote the launch. She also did a quick YouTube video promoting Vevo, etc… She’s on Def Jam Records, which is owned by Universal Records… who is one of the biggest owners in Vevo. Funny thing is Rihanna is launching her new video “Hard” on Thursday… premiering exclusively on MTV and all MTV online properties… that means no Vevo premiere. Who dropped the ball on that one?

Photo source: MTV.com