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Business News Digital
Vevo announces a string of innovations as it moves towards subscriptions
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 15 July 2016
Vevo launched a whole raft of new features yesterday in a bid – the music video platform and YouTube-feeder says – to “create a more social, personalised and immersive experience”.
Though the real aim here is to pull more viewers directly into the Vevo platform itself, rather than to the Vevo-managed artist channels on YouTube, where many people currently consume the pop promos and original content distributed by the Sony and Universal-owned digital firm. Indeed many music fans currently won’t even realise they are consuming Vevo distributed content when streaming it via YouTube.
Vevo hopes to get a direct link to more viewers with a revamped app that offers a whole load more functionality, much of it borrowed from the apps of the audio-only streaming services. A whole new content and curation programme has been launched too, with a line-up of names announced to bring human curation to the service, some of whom – like Maya Jama, Yasmin Evans and Phil Taggart – will also appear in Vevo videos.
For now the revamped Vevo will continue to be ad funded, though the big shift into subscriptions is also still on the agenda, and is part of the reason why the company needs to get more people directly into its own proprietary platforms.
Word has it that the Vevo subscription service – being video based and therefore having much less content overall – will enter that market with a cheaper monthly rate than the £10 norm of the audio streaming platforms. Whether that will then appeal to a more mainstream audience, never likely to spend £120 a year on recorded music, remains to be seen.
