Return on Intention

Apparently, I am not alone in using YouTube as a jukebox. Its pretty convenient to load up a few songs in YouTube and listen while working, as long as you have the bandwidth to do it. Over the past month with all the running around and frantic schedules, I let iTunes do the work of playing tunes until today when my dear friend Daniel Lyons sent me an instant message that read:

“Take on Me” by Reel Big Fish just came on my Pandora. This is your fault somehow.

I don’t have that song in my iTunes library, and now being reminded of its existence I went to YouTube for my ska fix. Boy was I pleasantly surprised.

On December 6, 2009 a new service owned by Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, EMI and Abu Dhabi Media Company, and developed and hosted by YouTube, Sony, and Google Videos went live. The service is called VEVO that hosts music videos for record labels. The quality of the videos (while not HD … yet) is pretty high quality compared to the default settings of YouTube videos. These videos are the kind you would find on MTV back when MTV played music videos. Somewhere along the way from its fantastic birth to today, MTV seems to have forgotten what it was. I can only assume that MTV found they could make more money by creating reality tv programming than by playing music videos, and some marketing guru convinced them that their brand had outgrown “music videos” and had become a “lifestyle brand” that directed pop culture, so expanding into foreign territory was a good idea. I don’t mean to suggest that the aforementioned marketing guru was wrong, necessarily. This strategy could very well have been the right thing to do for MTV, but either way they are not the place to go for music vidoes anymore. The place to go was YouTube, and now its VEVO.

The reason VEVO was created seems to be more about satisfying a business need than a market driven, or so most of the stories I have read seem to point to. If that is true, then this is a good example of unrequested innovation that meets the business needs and consumer expectations.

Why did they launch VEVO?

The business reason to create this is because many advertisers (the revenue stream for YouTube and Google) are weary about their ads showing up next to user generated content. The fear is that if something offensive, or “off brand” occurs on the video, some people might carry that association over to the brand whose ad is showing next to the video. Its also a nightmare for the music industry trying to figure out how they are going to make money with the internet when new channels pop up all the time that give their product away for free. VEVO helps in both these areas.

By keeping control over the content that is posted on the site, VEVO can assure advertisers that the quality and content of the videos are more controlled. This will help  nervous brand conscious advertisers to feel more assured that this is a good property to spend ad money on. VEVO also shares its ad revenue, so some money will come back to the labels for the use of their content. This model should be appealing to them, after all, thats how radio worked. We got to listen to the radio for free while the advertisers paid for it. This model should seem comfortable.

So what do the users get out of this?

There amount of frustration I would feel when searching YouTube for a specific music video was becoming too much to bear. It would take a bit of time to go through all the user generated content that used the song I wanted as a sound track, or sifting through the really bad live recording taken from someones cell phone at a concert. It was getting hard to find “the good stuff”. VEVO has solved that problem for me. Now my only problem is what to do when VEVO doesn’t have the song I want, but I’m sure that it will get better over time, if this model proves successful. As a user I now have YouTube for funny videos, clips and the user generated content I want to see, and VEVO for the music. I also don’t have to pay for it. The ad sponsorship allows me to check out the music I want to see without having to shell out some cash for it.

The interface is more designed for music as well. There is a lyrics button, so you can see the words while the video plays, as well as the ability create playlists. Of course there is also links to iTunes and Amazon so you can buy the tracks right from the site. This is much better than the few seconds I get on iTunes to preview a track. Now I can hear the whole thing, and see a professionally produced video all before I spend the buck to buy the song.

It seems like a win all the way around. I hope it sticks. I wonder what MTV is doing now?