A deep dive into the Guardian's music video article

Last month, The Guardian published an article, written by Michael Cragg, asking if TikTok killed the music video. While we’re glad the normies in the mainstream media are covering videos in this way, we struggle with the framing since obviously music videos never die. But we also think it puts too much blame on TikTok and not enough on YouTube. So we decided to write this companion piece, that adds context to some of the claims and fact checks a few errors.

Cragg begins talking about how much the music industry loves stats. After listing off a few billion view videos, he claims that “music video viewership has plummeted, Beyoncé and Drake have stopped releasing videos altogether, and pop’s A-list are struggling to make a dent on a platform they previously dominated.”

First of all, Drake has released multiple official videos in the past several months which would have been a very easy thing to double check before putting it in the actual newspaper.

Cragg then moves into a section about how Dua Lipa, Ariana Grande, and Taylor Swift haven’t had any billion view videos in a while. For an article that’s as metics-brained as this one is, it cherry picks data points and doesn’t give context to the numbers. It’s true music video views are down, but the article assumes it’s due to some conscious choice by viewers, rather than the decisions of the video platforms to prioritize user (or AI) generated engagement bait over highly produced content like music videos. The view count on YouTube isn’t a reflection of user preference, but a reflection of content currently being prioritized by tech companies. The Guardian sees YouTube push out more slop and concludes people just really love slop these days.

The reason for YouTube’s push to slop is mostly due to their relationship with Vevo, the music video streaming platform owned by the major labels. Most of the videos you see on YouTube are there through a licensing deal, which gives the labels a much larger share of the ad revenue than your average uploader. The original agreement gave the labels exclusive control over the ad sales on music videos, meaning as a business Vevo was mostly sales people. Because of that, YouTube’s main way to grow their music video revenue was to push more and more traffic to music videos.

By 2017, Vevo was still not profitable, despite growing at a 30% rate and earning $650 million in revenue, almost completely though ad rev share on their 300 billion YouTube views from that year. At the same time, YouTube was in the process of launching YouTube Music, which created leverage and allowed them to restructure their deal with Vevo. This gave YouTube’s sales team access to the music video product for the first time, and effectively ended Vevo as we knew it. The new deal created a much better financial splits for YouTube, and opened up additional ways to monetize music content on it’s platform.

Suddenly, YouTube didn’t need to pump so many views to music videos to earn the same money. This is way you see the number of billion view videos grow steadily through 2018 and then fall completely off a cliff.

Like all platforms, YouTube just inflates the numbers of whatever content helps their bottom line. It was in their interest to drive traffic to music videos, and then they cut a better deal to make more money from less views. Highly produced content like music videos then got hit with a second wave, as Covid accelerated the push to the creator economy, and now the whole world needs to upload content to YouTube to survive, not just musicians.

In order to pull music videos back from where they are now, we want more outlets like The Guardian covering them. But the coverage needs to be accurate, and it can’t let the most responsible platforms off the hook. If anyone is killing music videos, it’s the YouTube salesforce, and it’s about time we start calling it for what it is.