This week, what’s new in music isn’t actually music, it’s a website. VEVO.com launched Tuesday night with premiere videos from 50 Cent, Timbaland ft. Drake, Mariah and Mary J. Blige.  The website is a joint venture between Google (owners of YouTube), Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and the Abu Dhabi Media Company, describing itself as:

” . . . the leading innovative online premium music and entertainment service for consumers, advertisers and content owners that blends the very best in musical content with cutting-edge video technology and a thriving user community powered by YouTube.”

In layman’s terms, this is the music industry’s attempt to monetize their content, music, music videos, etc., by pairing it with advertising.  Immediately, you might think, “Hey, doesn’t YouTube already do that?”, and the answer to that is, “Yes, they do.”  The only problem with that model was that the people who created the content were not being paid a portion of the revenues that YouTube received from advertising.  VEVO is an attempt to rectify this problem, and it may breath some life into a music industry that is struggling to be profitable as it adjusts to rapidly changing technology.

Thus far, three of the “Big Four” record labels, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Music (Warner Music Group is the lone holdout), and a slew of smaller indie labels have signed on to distribute content through VEVO.   Users will still be able to view musical content on YouTube through a VEVO-branded channel, and now will also have the option of viewing content at VEVO.com or through VEVO-branded embedded player.  For record companies, this is the first concerted step towards harnessing the web for profit that incorporates the way users interact with music and videos online.  As consumers, we now will have to put up with a few more ads before seeing the latest videos, but that may be a small price to pay in exchange for a music industry that can now sustain itself.

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