Music videos go online - end of music TV era - MUST READ

Awesome article dropping down on the state of music videos as a promotional tool and source of revenue to the music industry.

- Don't forget now! Kurb is australasia's leader in dedicated techniques to market and distribute your videos online through Youtube and potential revenue generators such as megavideo, revver and over 15 other video sharing sites.

The economic model that MTV was built on has been shredded - big budget one off videos are out - the digital revolution is upon us! You have the power to cut an album and make a video in your own bedroom and distribute it worldwide!

So don't make one song, one video, keep making songs, keep uploading videos, film gigs, film band practices, make vblogs, make funny shorts, talk about your music, blog about your music, build your following, interact, be an entertainer, create meaning, connect with them and connect them to your music!

visit Business weeks gallery of 10 stars who revolutionised the industry and reflect how innovation, community and interaction could change your musical career.

This new article drops after Bob Lefsetz and other cutting edge media critics denounce the MTV awards and Top 40 becoming just a circus sideshow to what's really happening in the music industry today - as witnessed by the brutal cannibalising of one of it's own, Ms. Britney Spears.

This from indystar:

Consumers Bop to Rhythm of Online Music Videos

[who came up with that clanger of a headline for such a decent article? Don't they know that blogging is 50% headline and 50% content???]

Viewership of music videos moved from TV to the Web at such a fast pace that few saw it coming.

Yahoo, the Web's top music destination, streams 240 million music videos monthly. MTV, which defined the young music video medium but now devotes nearly all of its airtime to non-music video fare, attracted 1 million viewers in prime-time viewing in August.

"Online is the single-largest place where consumers are watching music videos," says Rio Caraeff, executive vice president of eLabs, Universal Music Group's digital division. "When we release a video, we still put it on MTV and BET, but in terms of the most impact from audience and revenue, it's online."

Videos used to be given to networks such as MTV to sell CDs. Now, labels charge for video usage. "It was clear that all of our content needed to be paid for," says Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG Music Entertainment's global digital business unit. "The times when we could make our content available for free so someone would buy the CD are over. We drive usage to the Internet sites, so we should be paid."

Hesse wouldn't disclose exact figures, but Caraeff says licensing of music videos to sites such as Yahoo, AOL Music and YouTube reaps $20 million yearly for Universal and is growing steadily.

YouTube has been at odds with much of the entertainment industry because some of its users digitize content on their own and put it on the site without compensating the content owner. MTV owner Viacom is suing YouTube owner Google in a copyright infringement case.

But Universal, Sony BMG, Warner Music and EMI have agreements allowing their music videos to be shown on YouTube. In exchange, they share in ad revenue. YouTube attracts the largest video viewing - including movie trailers, amateur productions and tech podcasts - on the Web, with 44.8 million visitors in August.

With 23.4 million visitors in August, Yahoo is the most-visited music site, followed by ArtistDirect, MySpace's music channel, AOL Music and MTV's music channels, including MTV.com, VH1.com and CMT, according to ComScore.

This summer, Yahoo began offering an application to post many of its videos onto pages of the wildly popular social-network site, Facebook. It has since expanded this concept, via a test site, to post videos from Universal and Sony BMG onto personal Web sites or blogs.

Once word gets out and music fans realize that they can take the latest videos by say, Justin Timberlake or Fergie, and post them to their blog, Yahoo Music general manager Ian Rogers believes the viewing of videos online will grow "from 10 to 100 times over the next one to two years," he says. "There's no question people want to do this."

He says Yahoo fought for several years to shut down sites that offered ways to hack into Yahoo Music and post videos. "We know the demand is there."
Demand and convenience caused music fans to migrate to the Web to watch the majority of their music videos, says Rogers.

"If you want to see a music video, why would you turn on MTV and hope to see the video you want, when you could go online and get it immediately?" he says. "The shift happened as music videos became more available online and less available on TV. This was a natural evolution."

MTV, the channel that defined music videos, isn't sitting out the digital revolution. On-air, the TV channel urges viewers to go to MTV.com to see the latest videos and video premieres. "We realize that we live in an on-demand culture," says MTV Executive Vice President Courtney Holt.

Holt says on-demand viewing is great, but it's TV exposure that still makes the difference for emerging bands. He cites groups such as OK Go and Paramore, which had major online exposure but took off after MTV started playing their videos.

MTV recently bought a 50 percent interest in digital music service Rhapsody to expand its online music reach. Both Rhapsody and MTV.com show music videos on their sites, while some sites - most notably Apple's iTunes - offer them for sale. Caraeff says streaming music videos represents the bulk of the action for music videos and that downloads represent a tiny fraction of sales. Hesse says his best-selling download of all time - a recent Timberlake song - clocked in at just 58,000 sales for $1.99 apiece.
"This is a good, growing business," he says. "As more people get video iPods, we'll start to see more people buying music videos."

Label executives are also looking for streams and downloads to mobile phones - currently a niche business - to explode in the coming years as more wireless customers get multimedia phones.

"The average usage time on a phone for entertainment programming is no more than two or three minutes," says Caraeff. "The short-form nature of music videos makes it a perfect fit."

Q&A with Rio Caraeff

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham spoke with Caraeff about how music videos have shifted from TV distribution to the Web, and turned into a profit center.

Question: Is TV distribution for music videos still important?
Answer: Online is the single largest place where consumers are watching video. When we release a video, we still put it on MTV and BET, but in terms of the most impact from audience and revenue, it's online. We're reaching more people than we've ever reached before with our music, and have turned what was a promotional business into a revenue business, worth $20 million a year for us, and growing.

Q. Where are people viewing the music videos online?
A. YouTube and Yahoo Music are the lion's share, along with MySpace and AOL. In the last quarter, we had 265 million streams of our videos online, and that doesn't even include YouTube, which is just starting to report activity. We have a Universal channel on YouTube, and the last time I looked, we had 180 million streams. YouTube is becoming the largest place for where our videos are played.

Q. Talk about how you make money off videos.
A. We were the first major label to realize that the old ways of doing business with music videos wasn't working anymore. Twenty years of videos as a promo piece wasn't stimulating sales of CDs. We had to turn videos into a premium product that feels free and convince Web sites to pay license fees for usage. Now every time the video is played, we get paid. We also offer them for sale at sites like iTunes, and via mobile phones and Verizon and Sprint. Both are flourishing, but the lion's share of activity is via streaming.

Q. Music videos used to boast of million-dollar budgets and big-name directors. What's the state of music videos today?
A. Clearly, the days of multimillion production budgets for videos has waned, but we've been able to do more with less. The budgets have come down, but the creativity has risen. With the challenge of doing more with a smaller budget, some of the best videos have come in with no budget, using Mac computers, high-def cameras and a small crew.
I even envision a world where music videos are created by the fan, and collaboration that exists in a digital, all-Internet world - the artist creates the song, and fans can go online, and make the videos. We're going to see a lot more creativity. It's no longer just about one big company publishing, it's a two-way communication. This is completely new to our industry and something we embrace.



Cheers for the connection with Kurb.

Supporting musicians with successful strategies on a budget.

Kurb is NZ’s leader in online promotion strategies for artists and creative projects plus we offer the cheapest
CD/DVD reproduction and
cheap posters available.


Come by our page, theres plenty to pick up about new developments in the music industry in our blogs and theres a whole lot of free info and articles at our self promotions hub. Get some scope checking out our overview of online promotion strategies and if you’re interested our artist packages or brand new campaign packages including CD’s, posters and a dedicated online distribution, promotion and videomarketing program.


All the best with your music, from Kurb
For direct enquiries get us on gmail as kurbpromo


.....................
Kurb Myspace

Marketing 2.0 for Web 2.0 - how your business can benefit

Marketing 2.0 for Web 2.0 – how can your business benefit?

The Internet is the most powerful and far reaching marketing tool available to small businesses and increasingly word of mouth is now word of blog, email or IM and thats what web 2.0 is - when we stop hearing the messages sent by those who can afford to send them and we just learn from the messages we share from the access the internet now provides to one another.

According to Tim O’Reilly who coined the phrase “Web 2.0” in 2004:

"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."

Web 2.0 presents opportunities to use the internet in new and interactive ways to deliver an unprecedented amount of information and choice to unprecedented audience numbers.

Unlike declining traditional media the internet offers users control over access and it gives consumers choice. Web 2.0 represents a major blow for traditional advertising methods because Web 2.0 is about the online experience the user has customised – and no one wants ads! Marketing is to survive only as part of a media experience that is embraced, not an unwelcome interruption to be filtered out.

Social Networking:

Social networking – the explosion of sites like Myspace, Bebo, and Facebook – has transformed the online social environment into a place where branding happens naturally. Myspace, the big daddy of social networking sites, created an online environment where brands as well as bands, characters and ideas could be accounted for with online identities.

You only have to go to the stats to see the wild popularity of these sites in New Zealand and around the world. Even I choked when the Herald quoted 800,000 kiwis use http://www.bebo.com/. It comes behind only Google and Trademe for volume of usage in NZ.

By creating a presence for your business on social networks you are able to present content and interact with other users participating in a massive global network either as an individual representing or creating awareness (this will be required on facebook and bebo which are not so friendly to commercial brands), a brand profile of your business, or even a key product! Or all three! There’s no rule against having multiple accounts.

SEO and web 2.0 - when content "goes viral"

It is still the truth that most of your website traffic will come from search engines and in New Zealand that is overwhelmingly accounted for by the Google search engine. To put what is often reported to be a complex and competitive study into simple terms, search engine optimisation (SEO) is based around keywords matched to your content, and the ranking of its relevancy in the search by the amount of links to it and the quality of those links.

Search engines can be influenced in two ways – by both the quality and quantity of written content you make available and the quantity and quality of backlinks created to your site from other sites. Distributing and sharing as much content furnished with links back to your site as you can make available is the most effective way to dramatically increase your search rank, send your brand around the world and bring traffic to your website.

All I will say is that websites that follow the web 2.0 format, which are some of the highest ranked in the world – myspace, youtube, blogger – the last two of which of course are owned by google, are ranked in a different way by google, and using these sites in different ways to make people aware and provide links to your website can have dramatic results.

But when your marketing message has assumed the appearance of a media experience – whether a blog, a podcast or a short video demonstration - that you have made available through your various online social network to share and enjoy as “infotainment” it’s no longer advertising! And when people are motivated to share the information you have provided they are not only building your search ranking but sharing your marketing message that your personal brand represents knowledge and experience of the products and services you provide.

Video Marketing

Video marketing is the hottest thing in internet promotion right now and youtube is popular with an older demographic where social networking hasn’t spread. Unlike everything else I’ve talked about – videos in themselves will not increase your search rank on google! But the message out there is if you can do it, prove it - film it! People want to see for themselves and now you can show them!

Video content provides important information, breaking down the anonymity that effects a potential customer or clients decision to purchase through an online connection based on trust. Video is also the most potentially effective opportunity to offer deeper understanding through presentation and demonstration.

many more people will connect with your marketing messages as a visual image and when it comes to media – the types of small businesses that could never dream of affording to market by broadcasting video can now provide it cheaply in a way that makes it accessible to targeted users long after it is first made available.

One of the most successful viral campaigns focused on a series of short clips experimenting with blending different unusual objects in a brand presentation for a blender called "will it blend?"– one of these quirky clips featuring an iphone received over 3 million views on youtube.

XML, RSS, P2P, Aggregation

Web 2.0 continues to present newer and better solutions for distributing and accessing information but unlike social networking and video marketing these concepts of syndicating content feeds and providing ever more options for choice and access are ideas which time is yet to come.

But it remains that web 2.0 marketing is about “pull” and not “push”. Using social networking, and sharing blogs and videos, generating content that appeals to users whether it be through information, experience, demonstration, experiments or simply just the quirky, entertaining or humourous is a chance to build awareness of your business while connecting with people in a way they will appreciate and remember.

People are far more likely to "go with what they know" so establishing social profiles and participating in online communities, providing content that people will use and value, in a way that supports higher ranking in searches for your site is the best way for generating leads and contacts in the new online environment.

Cheers for the connection with Kurb. Supporting musicians with successful strategies on a budget. Kurb in NZ’s leader in online promotion strategies for artists and creative projects plus we offer the cheapest CD/DVD reproduction and cheap posters available.

Come by our page, theres plenty to pick up about new developments in the music industry in our blogs and theres a whole lot of free info and articles at our self promotions hub. Get some scope checking out our overview of online promotion strategies and if you’re interested our artist packages or brand new campaign packages including CD’s, o All the best with your music, from Kurb For direct enquiries get us on gmail as kurbpromo ..................... Kurb Myspace