Skateboarding dogs be damned; The most popular clips on YouTube are music videos.
The top 5 pieces of content of all time at YouTube are music videos:
- Psy "Gangnam Style"
- Justin Bieber f/ Ludacris"Baby"
- Jennifer Lopez f/ Pitbull "On The Floor"
- Eminem f/ Rihanna "Love The Way You Lie"
- Lady Gaga "Bad Romance"
These aren't viral videos. These are big budget, major labels. And 4 of the 5 are VEVO videos — and PSY will now likely be through VEVO for new videos, since he's now in the Universal family. In fact, except for The Evolution Of Dance, an Adele lyric video, a Gummy Bear abomination and a live Spanish language clip, the Top 30 YouTube all-time is entirely music videos.
So, a renewal of the VEVO and YouTube deal shouldn't be shocking. Nor should it be a surprise that Google/YouTube is doubling down, reportedly making a $50 million equity investment with VEVO.
Here's a particularly resonant tidbit from that Bloomberg article:
Vevo, which shows videos from artists signed to labels owned by Sony Music and Universal Music, drew 51.6 million unique U.S. viewers in December, according to ComScore Inc., the Reston, Virginia-based researcher. By comparison, Google’s websites including YouTube had an audience of about 181.7 million.
As The Atlantic Wire put it in their article on this same topic: Google Believes in the Music Video. Maybe we should too.
And, no, I won't subject you to Gangnam Style again.
