VentureBeat reports that Vevo generated 35 million unique visitors and a staggering 13 billion video views in December.
The easiest way to understand VEVO is that it is to music videos what Hulu is to TV shows: a corporate (in this case record labels) founded, ad-supported way to aggregate and serve up videos on the Web. Instead of having to wade through all the user-made junk on YouTube to find the real, high-grade and high-quality music videos, VEVO's channel features only label or artist-produced videos, with great sound and video quality (though not HD yet).
Vevo really does appear to dominate the music videos on YouTube. Most of the official professional music videos on YouTube now seem to be from Vevo. They also have embedding turned on which helps them dramatically increase views. A lot of music publisher stupidly turn off embedding.
Video Mysteriously Takes YouTube's #1 All-Time Most Viewed Slot
Reel Pop, ReadWriteWeb and others are blogging about a home-made music video called "Cansei de Ser Sexy Music is My Hot Hot Sex" that has bumped Judson Laipply's popular Evolution of Dance video off the #1 spot on YouTube's all-time most viewed videos list. A post on Waxy.org analyzed the video's stats and found an unusually high views-to-ratings figure of 21,487 as well as a low number of comments. The video also has only has two honors. One would expect a video that suddenly takes YouTube's all-time most viewed crown to have more than two honors.
Most of the comments on the video indicate disbelief that this video could garner so many views so quickly. It is hard to believe this video legitimately made its way to the top of YouTube. Here are some of the comments.
ikill4u784 says, "OMG! it cant sneak up as most views in less than a week. i've never even seen this with 25m views b4!"
Chargrad says "What... The... Hell... even with hot hot sex in the title how can this have got so many views?!?"
mattjsrules says, "This only had 4 million views 2 weeks ago wtf? someone must of refreshed it 80 million times or someone hacked."
It will probably get many views now that it is #1 on YouTube. Cansei de Ser Sexy is also known as CSS. They are a Brazilian band. They received a fortuitous popularity boost when their "Music Is My Hot Hot Sex" song (the same song as in the suddenly popular video) was featured in an iPhone commercial. Here's the video that is now listed as #1 on YouTube'a list of the all-time most popular videos.
The Christian Science Monitor has an article (hat tip The Blogging Journalist) about how Indie labels are using bloggers to get independent artists noticed. They also report how the idea is already having an impact on music sales and the Billboard music charts.
In recent weeks, albums from indie acts The Shins and Arcade Fire both recently debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard charts, selling about 90,000 units each. The two bands soared past releases by entrenched mainstream artists such as Christina Aguilera and Nickelback. And this week, Modest Mouse, a longtime independent powerhouse – now signed to Sony – made a splash with "We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank."
The commercial explosion is no accident. Indie labels may have finally found a way to harness the Internet's sizable community of tastemakers. These music labels are bringing bloggers who have a reputation for posting legal and illegal MP3 tracks into the fold by purposefully leaking albums ahead of the release.
Much as iTunes created a palatable model of digital downloading, these labels increasingly rely on carefully controlled – and sometimes uncontrolled – leaks of MP3 files to publicize upcoming records. Ever since the arrival of file-sharing sites such as Napster and Grokster, entertainment firms have grappled with the question of whether to crack down on the sharing of copyright material or find a way to harness its spread to boost music sales. Even as major entertainment firms mull similar questions relating to the spread of unauthorized clips on YouTube, the popular video-sharing site, they will be keeping close watch on the effectiveness of such "leak" strategies by small labels.
In addition to leaking albums to bloggers music companies can also get bloggers to spread the word about new music by offering embedding music videos. A lot of independent artists are using YouTube and/or MySpace Videos in this manner. We mentioned a few artists that were garnering subscribers on YouTube a couple months ago. Some larger labels like RCA Records, a unit of SonyBMG, are also using YouTube to make music videos available online for embedding. Recently they put music videos from Katharine McPhee and Avril Lavigne on YouTube. They also kept the embed feature activated so bloggers could embed the videos. For example, here is the video for Katharine McPhee's "Over It."
If it works for the indie bands then the larger music publishers can be expected to eventually give it a go as well. If all the music labels offer embeddable music videos than bloggers could really become the new VJs.
VentureBeat 