The popular music website, Vevo, may be taking a hint from its fellow Internet music providers and launching its own paid subscription tier, according to Vevo CEO Erik Huggers.
Vevo earns around 17 billion views per month with the majority of that being consumed on YouTube as it is one of YouTube’s largest content providers.
Huggers said in an interview with Re/code that its free ad-supported service will continue to operate but added “just having an ad-supported model is not sustainable in the long run.”
Vevo is aiming to create a subscription service that is more of a curated experience “that only focuses on music, that does justice to music” said Huggers. Of course a subscription service won’t be possible without incentive for users to pay for a service they had previously consumed for free.
That is where original content comes in and Vevo is banking on original content in the music vein, specifically a handful of high-profile documentaries, according to Huggers. Vevo already offers some original programming and has done for a while now, and it recently acquired the streaming video platform
ShowYou, with its team and technology now integrated into Vevo’s projects. So the company could be at a point in which it is equipped well enough to launch a subscription service featuring a slate of original programming that could drive subscriptions to a Vevo paid tier which could be introduced as early as this year, Huggers said.
This first ran in Rider Research’s Online Reporter.