AVC.com on Vevo.com’s launch
I found this fascinating quote today:
It’s probably that Vevo is not completely rolled out yet but it would seem to me that for it to be successful, the Vevo videos will have to show up in YouTube and Google search results. And they don’t right now.avc.com.
It is absolutely true that for many, YouTube is their streaming music service. There is so much music on YouTube. You can get a result for most any song you look for. So it makes sense that the music industry is trying to get its arms around this new form of music discovery and listening.
But I wonder if cordoning off the “official” music videos into a separate site will achieve this goal. We’ll see. I’m not that optimistic about this one.
A VC, Dec 2009 (avc.com)
I tried to use http://reblog.zemanta.com to pull out this quote from Fred Wilson’s avc.com blog; however, it didn’t work with my custom tumblr domain. Oh well.
Anyway Fred’s critique of Vevo.com seems incredibily harsh as well as misguided in my opinion, Vevo’s service has just launched, and as a result has not had the time to build credibility in Google yet. In fact, people would rightly be screaming bloody murder if Vevo was already ranking for music after 1 day. For example, if you search on “Vevo” today, you even get the suggestion “See results for: bebo.” My guess is that once Vevo gains some stability so it can handle traffic, Google will begin giving it some link juice via youtube.
Next, comments on Wilson’s post seem to take issue with music labels in general, and as a result essentially would prefer to have the videos under the “control” of youtube as opposed to the label’s Vevo. Weird …
I think Hulu (remember the “clownco” label on hulu by youtube executives?) has shown pre-roll and post roll ads will work and most consumers will love the features Vevo has over youtube.
Further, Wilson’s “music discovery” ideas are unfortunate. One of the largest problems with content piracy/misuse on youtube, metacafe and others is that it crowds out true innovators in the music discovery, streaming music business and artists.
When it is said and done, it is clear winning music labels will be smaller and musicians have greater say.
However, in the short term I think it is better for everyone to have a bunch of smaller consortium sites Hulu, Vevo, “Pulu” (magazine publishers) etc. rather than Google (or Google and Microsoft) in sole control of the discovery of all content. I can’t believe Wilson didn’t touch on that.
At the very least Vevo and Hulu for all their faults are breaking the Google-Youtube monopoly on video content.
