Vevo in vitro: YouTube, Universal make a deal

You can call it, if you wish, Universal's attempt to create a musical Hulu: YouTube and Universal have shaken hands on a plan for a site under an ugly brand to "highlight" UMG's artists:

Google’s YouTube and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group will be launching a new site, dubbed VEVO, that will highlight UMG’s videos. The site will launch in “coming months” according to a press release (below). And YouTube users will still be able to watch UMG clips from the likes of Lil Wayne via a “new VEVO channel through a special VEVO branded embedded player.”

When I was a kid, the corner shop was called Vivo. One time, the assistant took all the neck-labels off the Daddy's sauce bottles so I could send away for the free Basil Brush toy they were offering without the need to tiresomely purchase the three bottles of sauce required. I was too shy to tell her that I didn't really want a Basil Brush, but it was awfully nice of her to do it. Although if you came in later and bought a bottle of sauce, and liked Basil Brush, you might not think so. But there are always losers.

You can see why YouTube might be hoping that a safe area, with only official stuff, might give a chance of selling some advertising against its massive, expensive video inventory.

You can also understand why Universal might hope this will work - nobody on the top floor of labels has ever really quite understood that, for most labels, and for most of the audience, the label that a track comes out on means nothing; that nobody is going to think "I wonder what fine artists Universal might want to entertain me with today".

Ironically, the only way VeVo is going to work is if websearch is brilliant at delivering people looking for the artist's videos to the site, which means they're going to be more reliant on Google than ever.