Vevo pays up

Music video service VEVO has paid over $200 million to rights owners since being set up in 2009 according to head honcho Rio Caraeff, speaking at the Business Insider conference in New York this week. Although co-owned by Sony Music and Universal Music, VEVO licences content from a wide range of labels and publishers, sharing ad revenues with its content partners.

Sony and UMG look to up Vevo investment

The Sony/Universal owned music video service VEVO is looking to raise new finance to fund global expansion, according to reports in. 


The digital music has a target of $100 million to $150 million to be raised in new investment.

Publishers start to ask about a VEVO royalty

The Beastie Boys iconic 'Sabotage' promo

David Israelite, CEO of US's National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), has called for a number of changes to the way the US music publishing business runs, both in the way publishers licence digital rights, and in the way American copyright law applies to digital licensing and the way collecting organisations operate. In particular the NMPA boss was critical of American record labels who are utilising contract clauses to avoid giving publishers their share when they are paid by online video sites, in particular VEVO, which includes major labels Sony and UMG amongst shareholders. 

In February we blogged about comments from indie publisher Matt Pincus, who had said his company was receiving no income from the booming music video service, because in the US VEVO had deals with the record companies (including Sony and UMG) that put the obligation to pay publishing royalties onto the labels, rather than paying royalties direct to the publishers - and the labels used contract clauses relating to promotional videos to say that the payment of song writing royalties could be avoided. An unhappy Israelite took this a stage further saying  "Today you have VEVO talking about reaching $150 million in revenue and wanting to grow to $1 billion, and a large amount of the music videos being played are not getting licensed [by our members] and publishers are not being paid. NMPA is going to put an end to that".

Music tops YouTube channel viewing

ComScore has eleased its first comScore YouTube Partner Report, putting some actual numbers to the popular streaming platform's successes. Machinima had 17.7 million viewers in August, which exceeds the average number who watch NBC's Sunday Night Football and the mostly under 35, male-skewing Machinima audience sticks around for a monthly average of 70 minutes per viewer. But it was music videos that reached the most people on YouTube. The Universal/Sony platform Vevo attracted the most viewers with 60.6 million and Warner Music clocked up 31 million, with average times of 60 minutes and 29.1 minutes respectively.