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.



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