Last Updated: May 2023-

What is Vevo? They have proven to be an absolute revolution, for better or worse, in music video sharing online.

Vevo music, aka ‘Video Evolution’, is found all over YouTube, smart TVs, digital media players, and streaming TV services. These days, music videos online are very common. Free music videos are on-demand via YouTube whenever you like but it has been Vevo paving the way for nearly 20 years towards making this a standard.

Who Is Vevo?

Co-owned by Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment among other partners, Vevo set out to revolutionize the music video industry when it was initially launched in 2009.

The service was originally conceived as a streaming service for music videos, similar in design to Hulu.

Vevo today is found not only on YouTube but platforms like Roku, Pluto TV, and others, providing widespread access to music videos from today’s best artists in all genres.

Since mid-2018, most of Vevo’s attention has been put on YouTube syndication and extending reach through the social platform.

Whether it has done anything to revolutionize the music business is a matter of debate but no one can argue with its over 1 billion users worldwide and the more than 26 billion views it acquires every month. Compare this to Spotify which has just over 489 million users and suddenly, Vevo begins to sound as massive as it really is.

Why Does No One Talk About Vevo Music?

The reason why Vevo is not discussed in the same sentences as Apple, Spotify, and TIDAL has to do with the fact that Vevo does not yet have any paying customers.

It is also so closely embedded into YouTube that not a lot of people even know that Vevo is its own company.

This begs the question of how does Vevo makes its money – well, the answer is through digital advertisers. Instead of selling user subscriptions, like Spotify, Vevo depends strictly on digital advertising to bring in income, sharing this with artists registered with the company.

What this means for the music business is something very interesting. Vevo has retained and grown its user base through an ad-based model, which may be where Spotify and similar services are headed in the future.

Current trends in advertising reveal that traditional methods such as TV are slowly losing their advertisers to online and the Internet. This is where YouTube, Vevo, and others are seeing their revenues increase significantly.

How Profitable Is Vevo Music?

The difficulty is Vevo only recently became profitable, somewhere around 2018. Despite making as much as $760 million a year, Vevo continues to struggle somewhat with money-making and it’s hesitated to become a subscription service. It still isn’t.

However, the video-sharing platform may end up having to move towards a subscription-based platform if the data supports it.

In the meantime, Vevo continues to dominate all music video streaming competitors in terms of user count and views.

Assuming that Vevo does begin to use a subscription model, even if it were to convince as little as 5 percent of its users to buy in, analysts argue it could net 20 million subscribers and become one of the major players instantly.

Vevo & YouTube Are Synonymous In Music Video Sharing

In addition, it goes without saying that Vevo and YouTube have always been somewhat interconnected in the sharing of major artists’ videos.

Through YouTube, Vevo has helped to launch a myriad of major artists’ music videos with record-breaking views. Tracks like Taylor Swift and Brendan Urie’s “Me!”, Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next”, Adele’s “Hello”, Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda”, and Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” have all been launched by Vevo, earning hundreds of millions of views each.

What Vevo is attempting to do now is to drive as many of its users as it can to its own Vevo-based platform via its website and app.

Though they still remain co-dependent, roughly 38 percent of YouTube traffic is generated through Vevo views. This is a major benefit to YouTube and, on the other side, a lot of Vevo’s revenues come from YouTube ad dollars. How these two platforms continue to relate in the future will be an interesting thing to see.

What Vevo has accomplished so far is that it has outlined a distribution channel through which the major labels can release video-based music content and have it be seen by millions of people. Done right, this instantly generates buzz for an album release, a concert tour, or whichever product that needs to be promoted.

Is VEVO The Future Of Music Videos?

Ticketmaster dominates live event ticket sales. Could Vevo one day be the be-all, end-all of music videos?

Vevo has a great thing going with YouTube but they have already gone beyond this partnership. Vevo-connected TV channels and genre-specific channels continue to be launched across more than 35 distribution platforms.

They have proven to be skilled at targeting specific genres and audiences, and taking revenues from ads they sell before and after their music videos.

In addition, Vevo produces 500 hours of music-related original programming every week, according to Forbes estimates.

Back in the 1990s, MTV was the brand so closely associated with music videos. Then, money started leaving music videos and MTV shifted its business to something different. That gap meant Vevo could swoop in, quickly gain market share, and produce a different business model to derive revenues, and they’ve only grown since then.

Vevo music on YouTube is what most people will tell you when you ask where the best place is to watch a music video. They’re the present and likely the future of the modern ‘music video’, for all of the good and bad that means.

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