Meet VEVO, YouTube’s New Music Video Hub

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I read recently in both Gizmodo and TechCrunch now of the upcoming launch of Vevo,  a site billed as the ‘premium online music hub built for consumers, advertisers, and content owners..’. The site is a collaboration between Universal Music Group and YouTube and is expected to launch later this year.  The launch of the site will feature UMG’s catalog of music videos powered by YouTube’s technology. The two companies will share advertising revenue generated by the site. Reportedly, deals with other labels are in the works.

Why launch a portal for music videos when you can essentially get them for free now on YouTube? It’s a question many are asking, but I suspect Google plans to change the game a bit on music content.  I highly doubt the site will just stream videos.  I’m sure it will be community driven and designed to separate the YouTube hack from the professional, high-quality VEVO content.  So no more scrolling through bogus, homemade videos to find the content you’re looking for.  Yeah! Considering ad revenues on music video content is an area that UMG actually made money, the venture makes sense. Labels need to figure out somewhat to make money these days, don’t they?

Twitter Concerts – SF Band Logs 3000 Downloads Using Twitter

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Moonalice.  Heard of them?  Yeah, you and no one else outside of Silicon Valley either. Luckily lead guitarist Roger McNamee knows a thing or two about technology, being one of the Valley’s most well-known venture capitalists. TechCrunch reported that the band staged it’s first Twitter-integrated concert at a venue in San Francisco recently and logged 3000 downloads of their music using the platform.  Pretty impressive for a band no one’s ever heard of and an eye opening tactic for bands to successfully leverage Twitter as a viral marketing tool.

These so-called Twitter Concerts work something like this: immediately following each live song performed, it’s digitized, uploaded then tweeted about it’s availability with a TinyURL where users can listen and download the song.  It’s like a virtual live concert feed. And if a small local band can see that much success, imagine the impact if well known artists jump on the Twitter Concert bandwagon. By golly, I think we’ve just spotted a trend in the making – Twitter Concerts!  

According to The Underwire, hip hop artist K’naan is leveraging the Twitter platform in equally innovative ways to promote his music as well. Here’s to Web 2.0!

Pandora Ranks as Top iPhone App

Techcrunch reported that Pandora is currently the fourth most popular free app on iTunes (behind Apple’s Remote, AIM, and WeatherBug), and has reportedly been seeing a new listener every 2 seconds. Usage over the weekend hit an all-time high for the service, with 3.3 million tracks streamed to iPhone listeners alone. Perhaps more impressive is the retention rate of listeners, who are averaging over an hour of listening per day.

The Pandora music stream is great on the new iPhones with the 3G and Edge networks.  Between the iPhone and Sonos Digital Music System, music lovers are no longer tied to their computer to enjoy the benefits of Pandora’s personalized music recommendation service.  Rock on.

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