Three Latin American artists are scrapping it out to be the king of YouTube’s ‘billion views club’: Ozuna, Bad Bunny and J Balvin. The post J Balvin and Bad Bunny hit lucky 13 in YouTube’s ‘billion views club’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Rock band Disturbed have become one of the most prominent music artists to use image-generating AI technology to create a music video. The post Disturbed used an image-generating AI for latest music video appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Amazon has announced a deal with Xite to make tens of thousands of music videos available for free viewing on its Fire TV service. The post Amazon adds music videos to its Fire TV service in the US appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

One of the prime platforms behind the vertical videos trend is… going horizontal? Well, kind of. The post TikTok gets less vertical with horizontal full-screen mode test appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The television industry loves its acronyms, and FAST (free, ad-supported, streaming TV) is the latest buzzy one. The post Warner Music’s WMX launches three FAST music channels with Roku appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

British artist Emma McGann is launching a Discord RPG bot game alongside her latest EP ‘Monsterverse’, as well as Unreal music videos. The post Emma McGann talks Discord RPGs, Unreal music videos and pushing tech boundaries appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Subscription platform OnlyFans has been increasingly keen to talk about its potential for creators beyond the adult entertainment industry. The post British artist Shygirl debuts new music video on OnlyFans appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Video Killed the Radio Star… Diffusion transcribes lyrics from YouTube videos and turns them into prompts for Stable Diffusion images. The post Stable Diffusion used to turn lyrics into AI-driven videos appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Craig David all over your… desk? The British star’s latest collaboration, with KSI, has been turned into an augmented reality video for online brand LadBible. Fans can visit the microsite on their smartphones (here’s the link) and then point their camera at a space around them to pop up virtual versions of the pair performing […]

Live radio is already one of Apple Music’s big differences to its streaming rivals. Now it’s trying out MTV-style music television, although for the most part without the VJs. Instead, Apple Music TV is a 24-hour channel broadcasting music videos via the Apple Music and Apple TV apps, as well as on the web. For now, it’s […]

In August, Dua Lipa launched her #DuaVideo challenge on TikTok, inviting fans to submit videos based on makeup, animation or dance using her ‘Levitating’ single. The promise was that the best creators would make it into a music video for the track. TikTok says that the contest generated more than 150k videos which were watched more […]

Can you make money from livestreamed music performances on YouTube? Japanese artist Reol certainly did: to the tune of $130k. YouTube’s director of Black music and culture Tuma Basa revealed the figure in his appearance at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global online conference yesterday alongside colleague T. Jay Fowler, director of product management. Reol’s livestream […]

Jennifer Lopez and Maluma have just released a pair of singles together: ‘Pa Ti’ and ‘Lonely’, and like a growing number of artists, they unveiled the music videos in a YouTube premiere, yesterday. However, they also held an afterparty (a #PaTiAfterParty in hashtag form) which saw J-Lo and Maluma chatting about the collaborations, promoting their upcoming movie […]

BTS are no strangers to the gaming world, having starred in their first mobile game BTS World last year, with a follow-up (BTS Universe Story) about to launch. Now the K-Pop stars are heading to one of the biggest, buzziest games of all: Fortnite. This Friday (25 September) they’ll be premiering a new “choreography version” music […]

U2 are the latest heritage artist to be getting their archive of music videos spiffed up for modern-day viewers online. The band’s YouTube channel is relaunching as part of a collaboration between UMG’s Island Records, Interscope, UMe and UMC divisions and YouTube, with plans to spend the next year releasing remastered HD versions of U2’s music […]

For any aspiring filmmaker, the chance to have their work soundtracked by composer Hans Zimmer would be a dream come true. Now it will come true for five people. Zimmer has teamed up with Sony Music and YouTube for a contest challenging people to create original music videos for five of his compositions. A winner will be […]

Back in May, we wrote about an inventive digital marketing campaign for the band Glass Animals, letting fans poke around a virtual computer desktop and create stuff with their assets. Now label Polydor’s ongoing campaign for their album ‘Dreamland’ has taken some new twists. Fans were asked to download an app called Trnio, which scans real-world objects and […]

Shooting music videos is possible but challenging within the social distancing measures of this Covid-19 pandemic. The latest example of an artist getting a creative way around those barriers is Noah Cyrus, as part of the ‘A Sony Collaboration’ series of projects. You may remember we wrote about a Nicky Jam TikTok video created through the scheme […]

As predicted, Facebook is officially launching music videos, courtesy of licensing deals with all three major labels plus indie licensing agency Merlin, as well as BMG, Kobalt, and other labels, publishers and collecting societies. It’s not a global launch. For now, it’s in the US, as well as in India and Thailand, where the new […]

British artist Ellie Goulding has a pair of new videos out for her new tracks ‘Brightest Blue’ and ‘New Heights’. They’re the result of a partnership between label Polydor and Vevo for the latter’s ‘Official Live Performance’ series, but what’s notable is their use of ‘XR’ technology, which blends camera footage with computer-generated content in […]

Let us take you back on a short tour of Facebook music-video speculation. Start in 2012 when reports claimed Vevo – then the key aggregator of music videos – was in talks to ditch YouTube in favour of a partnership with Facebook. Then move to 2015, when video was one of the topics in the social network’s tentative talks […]

Imagine if 2D was four times better, or if 3D was, ahem, 2.67 times better. That’ll be 8D! And it’s 8D that Finnish artist Artem, who’s signed to Warner Music, is exploring with his new music video. We should stress, 8D isn’t about extra dimensions, but rather about a recently-developed way of recording and editing […]

Last week, we covered Twenty One Pilots’ scavenger hunt to promote their new single, ‘Level Of Concern’, which got fans to track down codes hidden online to unlock content. Which they did much faster than expected. “We didn’t think you would tear through the codes so easily,” the band tweeted. “Should have taken a week but you did […]

TikTok is not the only short-form video game in town and Triller has been snapping at its heels for some time, making a strong splash in the US and drawing in hip-hop acts in particular. Triller has now landed the exclusive on the video for ‘Come Back To Me’ by US singer/producer/model/YouTube personality Chantel Jeffries. The video is […]

In the streaming age, what is a ‘deluxe’ album anyway? It’s more than just extra tracks and alternative versions. A number of artists have explored Spotify’s ‘enhanced’ playlists format, which inserts videos between the music tracks, for example. And video is also at the core of the strategy for the deluxe version of Lil Baby’s […]

Friday saw the first ever Music Ally TV weekly show, broadcast using video-conferencing platform Zoom. Our guests included Rosie Lopez, president of Tommy Boy, and the topic at hand was YouTube. “We’re feeling very optimistic about YouTube. We’re projecting that YouTube could potentially become our number one DSP in the future,” said Lopez. “It’s a […]

As video-conferencing app Zoom continues to grow massively for business and personal use alike, it was only a matter of time before artists started using it to make music videos. Take a bow, Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, for being one of the first. The band’s new ‘Phenom‘ video was made using Zoom, […]

Up to this point, Facebook’s music-licensing deals have focused squarely on user-generated content. But for several years now – for example in the days when Vevo’s relationship with YouTube was thought to be on the rocks – there has been speculation about whether Facebook might fancy licensing music videos for its service. Now, according to Bloomberg, it may […]

Up to this point, Facebook’s music-licensing deals have focused squarely on user-generated content. But for several years now – for example in the days when Vevo’s relationship with YouTube was thought to be on the rocks – there has been speculation about whether Facebook might fancy licensing music videos for its service. Now, according to Bloomberg, it may […]

Fresh from adding an ‘HD’ tier to its Music Unlimited streaming service, Amazon appears to be preparing to add another element in to the mix: music videos. At least, that’s the gist of a ‘direct license amendment’ sent to licensors on behalf of Amazon by rights-management firm Music Reports. The email, which Music Ally has […]

Ed Walker, VP of original content & production at Vevo, used his presentation at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit to explain how to ensure videos on YouTube benefit from – rather than rub against – the platform’s recommendation algorithms. Walker used Vevo’s catalogue of music videos and original content – more than 400k videos in total […]

Lead: Sony Music India artist Badshah claimed to have broken the 24-hour record on YouTube for 75m plays of his track ‘Paagal’ in July. Then people started asking questions. It eventually emerged that the track’s success had been boosted by TrueView ads before and during other YouTube videos, all of which counted toward the opening […]

Hot on the heels of Björk releasing her new virtual-reality album, there’s a new VR experience for Daft Punk’s classic track ‘One More Time’. However, in this case, it isn’t an official release by the band. ‘Interstella VR’ has been produced as a fan project by Australian developer Jake Donaldson and a small team of collaborators […]

A birthday we almost forgot about: Vevo is 10 years old this year. The music-videos firm has published a few new stats to celebrate the performance of the 400k-plus videos in its catalogue. Vevo says that its catalogue is currently averaging more than 800m views a day, rising to near-1bn on the weekends. It also […]

This story has been written to the soundtrack of gravelly-voiced German artist Ben Zucker, as well as the ‘Ultimatver Party Hitmix’ of his compatriot Sonia Liebing. It’s been quite the listen. Why? Because we’ve been investigating Universal Music’s ‘Ich Find Schlager Toll!’ YouTube channel (translation: ‘I think Schlager’s great!’). It’s one of the projects called […]

Lead: In the 1970s, “pop promos” (as they were called) were the preserve of the mega-star act, but after the launch of MTV in 1981 they became standard practice across the industry. The arrival of YouTube in 2005 may have blown apart MTV’s dominance but the format of music videos did not change much; it […]

When the music industry criticises YouTube for the royalties generated by music videos, it’s driven by the assumption that music drives a LOT of YouTube viewing. But that’s often just what it is: an assumption, without much hard data to back it up. With that in mind, a new study by video and music analytics firm […]

‘Growth hacking’ is very much a Silicon Valley phrase: a term used to cover a range of tactics used by startups when they’re trying to build a big audience very fast, in their early years.  Yesterday at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit conference in New York, Vevo’s business operations and strategy manager Greg Duffy applied the […]

British artist Nao has a new video, produced by Sony Music UK’s 4th Floor Creative division in partnership with Microsoft. The video is for Nao’s track ‘Orbit’, and gets fans to put in their birthday to generate a video driven by their astrological sign. There’s more interactivity as the video continues, with fans’ input adjusting the […]

Last May, Vevo announced that it was going to phase out its owned-and-operated website and mobile apps, focusing instead on being a distributor for music videos and selling ads around that content. Vevo.com still exists but mainly as a glorified holding page, with users being pointed instead to youtube.com/vevo where the company has more than […]