Music Ally

David Eun was one of Google’s key execs when it came to dealings with the music industry – his MidemNet keynote interview last year famously began with the question ‘Why are you trying to screw the labels?’.

However, Google’s content partnerships boss is now leaving the company to take up a position as president of AOL Media and Studios. He’ll be in charge of the company’s network of content sites.

“David brings an impressive breadth of media experience to AOL at an exciting juncture as AOL forges a new future as a high-scale producer and partner in the content space” says the internal memo from CEO Tim Armstrong.

There might be discussion around the viability of YouTube’s ad-supported business model in the music industry, but the company’s director of video partnerships Patrick Walker tried to dispel them in yesterday’s closing session at MidemNet, where he shared the stage with Spotify’s Daniel Ek.

“Now we’re monetising over a billion videos per week,” said Walker, who also claimed that 75 of the world’s top 100 advertisers ran campaigns on YouTube last year, and that the site signed 500 new partners during 2009.

Walker also said that YouTube is generating CPMs of between £15 and £30 in the UK for pre-roll ads on the site.

(more…)

Barclays analyst Douglas Anmuth thinks it could. He reckons the video site’s revenues will rise 55% to $700 million this year, helping it to “start contributing positively” to Google’s bottom line.

Why? It’s all about the advertising – and specifically YouTube’s improvement in making money from its most popular clips.

“An improving advertising environment certainly helps, but with YouTube monetizing more than 1 billion video views every week, and with strong sell-out rates on its home-page from larger advertisers-we note 90% of the top 50 Ad Age have advertised on YouTube-we believe the site can profitably take share of the branded display & video market,” writes Anmuth in a research note.

YouTube’s profitability (or lack of) has been a live issue for the music industry, particularly when YouTube and Google have found themselves in conflict with bodies like PRS for Music and GEMA.

It’s been nearly three years since Viacom announced plans for a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google over YouTube, but the intricacies of the case mean it still hasn’t come to trial.

Now it may not, as both sides have filed motions for summary judgement, asking the court to rule in the case without sending it to trial.

Google maintains that YouTube is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and cites the recent decision in favour of Veoh in its legal battle with UMG.

Meanwhile, Viacom reiterates that Google knew about widespread copyright infringement on YouTube and profited from it, meaning it can’t claim DMCA protection. A resolution could – and we stress the ‘could’ – come sometime this year.

Remember Muziic? It used to be a PC application that let people build music playlists from YouTube videos, but just after Christmas it launched a website version.

One of the key selling points? The ability to also play videos from Vevo anywhere in the world – not just in North America – without seeing the accompanying ads. Vevo was quick to respond, emailing Muziic’s teenage founder David Nelson asking him to stop using Vevo’s content and trademark.

Soon after, Vevo removed its videos from YouTube’s API, ensuring that no third-party website could use them. Muziic is back to relying on pure YouTube videos for its music content, although the company has high hopes for its spin-off Facebook application, as well as the website.

YouTube and Last.fm have published year-end charts showing which artists were the most popular on their services this year.

Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent topped YouTube’s overall chart with more than 120 million views. For pure videos, Pitbull’s I Know You Want Me racked up 82 million views, followed by two Miley Cyrus vids: The Climb (64m) and Party in the U.S.A. (54m).

Meanwhile, Lady GaGa ruled the roost on Last.fm – her album The Fame was scrobbled 18.5 million times, followed by The Killers’ Day & Age (12.5m) and Lily Allen’s It’s Not Me, It’s You (10.5m). The hottest new artists were The xx, Fever Ray and La Roux.

Maybe they should team up in 2010 to take on the world. Hey, remember that MTV Awards when Madonna and Britney… Actually, no. NO.

Gig webcasts have a chequered history, to say the least. Squinting at a grainy postage-stamp sized video window trying to make out Madonna, in between swearing at buffering delays wasn’t many fans’ ideas of fun.

However, with technology having improved rapidly, there’s a new buzz around webcasts at the moment, thanks to the efforts of livestreaming companies like Ustream. Even YouTube is getting into the game with some high-profile gigcasts.

Ustream has been particularly busy, integrating its platform with Facebook to allow artists to both broadcast live and interact with their fans. Shakira debuted the video for her new music video Give It Up To Me using Ustream, and attracted 95,000 unique viewers during its initial ten-minute broadcast, and half a million more in the 24 hours after.

(more…)

Lots of YouTube news today. First, the company has announced that it’s running a “small test” of skippable pre-roll adverts – they run before videos, but users can choose to skip them.

“We know what you’re thinking: who would choose to watch an ad when they can skip it? Well, that’s what we’re trying to find out,” says YouTube’s blog post, which goes on to suggest that previous research indicates that 15-second pre-rolls see ‘completion rates’ as high as 85%.

Separately, YouTube has announced plans to up the maximum resolution of video uploads to 1080 pixels – true high-definition – later this week. “For our content creators, we want it to look as good or better than the source’s quality,” says YouTube’s Hunter Walk.

Finally, WMG videos are making their way back onto YouTube, surrounded by the label’s own branding, ads and prominent links through to products. It’s part of the deal negotiated by WMG when relicensing its videos to YouTube recently, in which it secured more control.

How successful was U2’s gigstream on YouTube last weekend? The site has revealed that it notched up more than 10 million streams during the concert – the largest single streaming event in YouTube’s history. What’s more, the 150-minute concert has attracted more than one million views since the weekend, now that it’’s archived on the site. “This was a big win for the YouTube community,” says head of music partnerships Chris Maxcy.

Last night saw YouTube’s live stream of a U2 concert in California, watchable by viewers in 16 countries.

A Twitter widget was built in allowing people to chat about the gig, complete with a dedicated #U2webcast – it’s still one of the top trending topics on Twitter this morning.

The webcast is still accessible on U2’s YouTube channel. However, it wasn’t the only livestreaming show this weekend…

Researchers the Far North Living Lab webcast a performance from the Insomnia festival in Norway, using BitTorrent. It was tied in with the EU-funded P2P-Next project.

“If the scalability is good for live streaming, this can increase the amount of viewers without massive bandwidth bills,” says researcher Njal Borch.

YouTube and BitTorrent – very different beasts, but both looking at better ways to power concert webcasts. It’s a far cry from the early days of grainy, postage-stamp sized webcasts.