Blog: Vevo

[If this was Medium, it would say ‘long read’ – you’ve been warned] I do not normally add disclaimers or qualifiers at the start of blog posts, but given how divisive the whole Article 13 debate has become, there is a big risk that some readers will make incorrect assumptions about my position on Article 13.

­­ In January Despacito became the second fastest music video in YouTube history to hit one billion views, taking just 97 days to do so. Now it is on track to hit four billion. In January Despacito was part of a succession of new music video consumption records that YouTube and Vevo are setting.

Warner Music Group has announced they will be acquiring Dutch Dance Label Spinnin Records for $100m. Whilst the label boasts some of the most popular names in Dance Music, such as Martin Garrix and Tiesto, much like the record Neymar transfer we discussed earlier this year , this is as much an investment in digital real-estate as it is for Spinnin’s copyright and management functions.

Today marks 40 years since the passing of Elvis Presley. Whilst ‘The King’s’ emergence has come to represent a cultural year zero for the music industry, his icon status in recent years has taken a hit.

Unless you have been on Mars for the last couple of days you will have seen the news that Luis Fonsi’s ‘Despacito’ has become the most streamed track in history with 4.6 billion streams. The figure includes a couple of versions of the track (ie the one include a certain Justin Bieber) but is an impressive tally nonetheless.

2016 was the year that streaming turned the recorded music business into a good news story, with revenue growth so strong that it drove nearly a billion dollars of total growth. Leading streaming services spent the year competing with ever more impressive metrics while playlisting and streaming exclusives became cornerstones of the wider music market both culturally and commercially.

Music video’s two power players are both in the news for strategic resets. On the one hand YouTube has announced that it is mergingits YouTube Music and Google Play Music team s while on the other hand Vevo has announced it is postponing the launch of its subscription service in favour of prioritising global expansion .

In 2016, YouTube finds itself in yet another spat with rights holders and this time the labels have brought artists to the battlefield. Playing a starring role is the issue of Safe Harbour, the provision defined in the nearly two-decades-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act that recuses YouTube from liability for User Generated Content (UGC) uploads.

Vevo has long been in search of an identity. In fact you could make an argument that it has had an identity crisis since its inception as a music industry appendage/Trojan Horse superimposed on YouTube (with the latter having little say in the matter unless it was willing to kiss label relationships goodbye).

Vevo has acquired video curation/discovery platform ShowYou . There’s a lot of talk about how this could preface a move into subscriptions for Vevo, given that ShowYou launched subscription functionality back in October 2014, and that’s probably right but there’s not too much about the company that makes it look like a big catch for Vevo.