According to Reuters, Irish premium music content upstart Muzu.tv has announced a deal with Universal where the world’s largest record label will have its artist’s music video content hosted. The company has also signed a deal with EMI, SonyBMG, Ministry of Sound and Cooking Vinyl. So only Warner to come on board surely that cannot be far away?
The service has received a large amount of support from the music industry due to way CPM rates the service receives, which is 4 – 5 times the rate YouTube currently gets and resulting in Google which owns YouTube taking down all premium music video content in both UK and Germany over per stream payment rate disputes with PRS (UK) and GEMA (Germany).
It is interesting to see that not even a week after a deal is signed between Universal and Google on the establishment of a premium music only video service Universal also announces a deal with Muzu.tv. Obviously, the company is placing a large focusing on audio -visual content.
Will this have any impact on the current PRS and GEMA negotiations with YouTube/Google over per stream rates probably not but what it does reinforce is that whilst YouTube rather immaturely withdrew all premium music content form its UK and German sites it has opened up a gap for new and more two-way scalable video models t come to the fore.
As TMV constantly states: Scale needs to be a two-way street between both new models and music rights holders if it is only a one-way street especially in terms of YouTube than I’m sorry but you do not have a viable business in terms of music content. Brand association with giving a way music from free has higher than traditional ad rate CPM value and as such companies like YouTube need to reflect this in the rates they get from brands and a media buying agencies if Muzu.tv can do it surely someone with the market cap of Google can?
It must be stated that this current deal between Muzu.tv and Universal is for the UK and Ireland only and will include artists like Amy Winehosue and U2. Good to see that Ireland’s biggest band will not be available on the Muzu.tv site considering Muzu is an Irish based company.
Hopefully that will move into a full global deal in the not-too-distant future. Obviously TMV is a bit supporter of Muzu.tv as we also user their video player for our video interviews. In the same announcement it was also stated that Muzu had signed a license to host videos on all Sony Music artists within the Bebo social networking site. The company is also the official partner for the Michael Jackson UK and Ireland website.
Talk about deals deal deals…keep your ears and yes to the ground for more announcements over the coming weeks
