Sacrilicious Marketing

EMI, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony pull YouTube’s Teeth Out by Deindexing Their Video Content and Placing it on Their Own Proprietary Networks, Hulu and Vevo.

As music labels, film studios, newspapers and other traditional publishers struggle to survive in the ever changing landscape of the Internet and it’s “free content” model, 2009 ushered in the world wide war against free content. Most pundits initially looked upon Ruppert Murdoch’s “Crazy Eddie” strategy of de-indexing all News Corporation content, including both the New York Times and The New York Post as a bullying tax collector strategy of old that would not suit the new media model. But, as it turns out, it worked! That content has value. Google and Bing wanted it badly enough to pay for it. And over the past few months, as the model has shown increasing promise, most major publishing houses including those in film, television and music have taken note and found ways to work similar deals. While Sony, Universal and EMI have launched Vevo a video music network with the help of their YouTube/Google partnership, Warner Music Group joined it’s mother company, Warner Bros in the long list of music, film and television companies embarking on deals with Hulu. The end game solution for publishers is to de-index their existing video and textual content from major hubs including search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and YouTube, publish it exclusively on their own networks and charge the engines for access to index that content and push traffic back to their own networks. The value for the publishing houses is that now they have a central and controlled domain where they can aggregate all their copyrighted content. This means that publishers are now generating income for the indexation of content and pushing traffic in bulk back to their proprietary sites where they can sell advertising. It allows they greater control over their copyright information and, overtime, will help them to build large scale branded networks to feature their data on. Essentially, these publishers are building their own on demand TV, Radio and News networks where they not only generate revenue from advertising but also from the indexing of their content. This should be both a boon for publishers and content producers.

Resource: Hulu Tops 1 Billion Streams per Month!

2010 and The Future of the Music Industry

“Music has been a significant player in the growth of the web since Napster, and its influence continues to grow. Spotify has made the biggest impact this year, gaining mindshare lost by Last.fm and Pandora. Meanwhile, Pitchfork has expanded its role as the web’s authoritative music magazine, and The Hype Machine came to prominence as a source of instant erudition by tracking the music blogs.” – The Guardian.

As I work in the music industry, I am most interested in what has been happening with Vevo and Spotify and how these ad supported and subscription based services can salvage the industry’s recorded music sales slump and revive the labels that produce the music. As more and more data, including music has begun to live in the cloud, I expect that these services will begin to tap the cloud, the social web and how their release of new music and videos will be altered. For example, I think it was groundbreaking that Shakira released a video to Facebook instead of YouTube, the Beatles greatest hits was released to USB for a richer media experience and that TopSpin has staggered and tiered it’s single releases through selected and limited time download offers. The new ways in which the industry will market its music and connect fans to artists will define the new decade and be the Savior or Destroyer of the labels. It will be a wild ride and I am grateful to be able to watch it from the inside. Thank you 2009 and welcome 2010.

Resources:

5 Predictions for the Music Industry in 2010

For Whom the Net Tolls

REWIND: The New Music Industry’s Week In Review

Muziic Plays Vevo, YouTube Music Without ‘Obtrusive’ Ads

Music Marketing and branding Trends to Watch in 2010

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