Back in the day — say, 1995 — there wasn’t a more potent force in music than MTV. Every band, every label, desperately wanted their music videos on the cable powerhouse.

Fast forward 20-odd years, and there’s no real music on MTV. But there is a place where people can watch all kinds of music videos: Vevo, which has been evolving rapidly in the past couple of years to embrace new ways that audiences are consuming their 500,000 videos on Connected TVs, in linear channels, and with lean-back experiences that advertisers love. 

JP Evangelista has been part of Vevo since it launched in 2009, backed  by YouTube, Sony Music and Universal Music. Evangelista and several other Vevo pioneers had helped develop Vevo while working at Universal’s global digital initiative unit, then joined the nascent streamer. 

“We felt that there was a huge value gap from the revenue that could be accrued against music-video viewership versus what was occurring,” said Evangelista, now Vevo’s SVP of content marketing and programming. “We were wanting to get these giant catalogs of music videos under one banner, create some scarcity in the marketplace so advertisers would have to come through a singular entity to buy the ad space around music videos and essentially create an advertising revenue-share model for our ownership.”

Now, the company has about 500,000 videos from the two majors and about 75 indie labels and groups. Those videos have always been available on demand, and now, as the business has evolved, they’re becoming available in ways that look more and more like traditional TV.  

“So much has changed over the years, and so much has shifted, right?” Evangelista said. “If we were having this conversation back in inception, we'd be talking about desktop views, which have done nothing but shrink over the course of the last 12 years. We have more screens than ever, in any given room. But the way in which most music video is consumed has shifted over the years, from desktop, to mobile, and mobile is still enormous and carries a great deal of scale for us. (But) over the last several years, we've really seen music video return to the living room.”

The scale of the company’s reach these days has grown prodigiously too, with 275 billion views last year across 50 territories, concentrated in the Western Hemisphere, Australia and Western Europe. The company has a U.S. monthly audience of 150 million, Evangelista said. YouTube remains the biggest distribution channel. But just last week, Vevo announced a deal with Alphabet’s Connected TV platforms, Google TV and Android TV. It already has a substantial CTV presence on Samsung TV, Roku, Pluto, and Apple TV.

Viewership began shifting to Connected TVs as early as 2018, and took off in the pandemic, jumping from around 10% to 35% of the total, headed to 4 in 10 of those billions of views, according to Evangelista.  

“We believe that trend should continue,” he said. “As you know, more and more people are accessing their favorite programming outside of music videos through Connected Television. That generalized consumption trend should continue. I think there’s plenty of room for share shift and growth outside of the U.S. as well.”

Connected TVs brings different viewing habits, and new programming and advertising opportunities, Evangelista noted. The person searching for a video or two on their phone at the bus stop is very different from someone who turns on a linear channel on Connected TV while cooking dinner or getting ready to go out. 

“So whereas you'd see maybe one to two videos (watched), tops, in a typical mobile session, we see seven to eight videos (on Connected TV sessions),” he said. “So you're really getting in, in a three-and-a-half minute format, closer to half an hour of viewing time, 30 to 35 minutes on an average session. That gives us the opportunity to present a plethora of different commercial opportunities to advertisers. It also allows us to be treated much more like traditional television, like a modern television network, given the endpoints that we sit in, and the ways that we can curate and as we get better and better at personalizing the experience to each and every user.”

On Samsung TV and Pluto, where the company controls the curatorial experience, it programs videos for linear channels, based partially on time of day and consumption patterns and music preferences that are typical on, say, a weekday morning versus a weekend evening. 

Vevo programs music by broad genres, though the definitions are “a little more amorphous than it used to be,” Evangelista said, mirroring the way particularly younger fans consume music in a world dominated by YouTube and TikTok instead of rigidly formatted broadcast radio. “Pop has moved to a place where it truly just means popular and heavily consumed, and it's almost agnostic of genre.”

Rap and hip hop are routinely part of the streams, and so too is Latin music. Acts like Karol G (2.3 billion views on the service last year) and The Weeknd/Ariana Grande duet Save Your Tears (620 million views worldwide) have topped the service over the past year. 

The main exception to that broad-minded programming is the so-called “decades” channels, which respectively feature songs from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s that appeal to fans of old-school music. Depending on the Connected TV platform, Vevo might provide 10 to 15 linear channels

Vevo doesn’t have that sort of control on its founding platform YouTube, still one of its biggest distribution channels, but also one where the  algorithm’s bias toward more recently uploaded music changes what gets seen. 

“You get a lot of support from the algorithm, the first five, seven, nine days, but then you see it wane over time,” Evangelista said. “There’s a multitude of factors at play on the platform. Music video is competing with literally every other upload in the world. And there are other effects that we're beginning to monitor, such as YouTube has a new product called Shorts. How does that (TikTok clone) affect a three-and-a-half minute video?”

The company doesn’t have a presence on Shorts yet, but it does see “amazing crossover effects” when a song (or more likely, a song’s hook) gets big on TikTok, he added. 

The company owns three studios (in London, Brooklyn and Manhattan, with Los Angeles opening soon) where it commissions live performances of songs and performers that may have just started to take off but haven’t already recorded videos for hot songs. It also works with big names such as J Balvin, The Weeknd, Doja Cat, and Justin Bieber to regularly create live performances from their newest music, usually relying on bespoke studio settings to capture unique new video performances.

Separately, its curation teams wade through 50 to 70 video submissions every week, from heavy metal to traditional pop. A separate program spotlighting new artists draws 500 submissions each time Vevo runs it.  

As a company that calls itself a “modern television network,” Vevo still relies substantially on traditional UpFronts to sell the bulk of its advertising time, attracting such big brands as Apple, Verizon and State Farm. The wireless carrier will be name sponsor on this year’s Live Performance Series featuring Balvin, The Weeknd, Grande and others. 

Advertisers have also embraced a relatively new curated product called Moods, featuring stylistically similar songs based on a specific sentiment, providing viewers with  a ready-to-go soundtrack for wherever their head is at. Now the company is beginning to visual beats and highlights within each video programming into a mood channel, further helping advertisers drill down and buy time accordingly. 

Evangelista notes that the company has begun “to start grouping those videos together and packaging those to advertisers, or even in the context of a playlist and then pairing a mood to it. We’ve really been filtering it down to try to build these taste profiles.” 

Looking forward to what’s next: “We think music videos could live around many different forms of content,” Evangelista said. “I can't specifically say what those are yet. But I think you'll be hearing from us throughout the course of the year for different potential destinations and places where music video has not appeared before, where it'll be appearing for the first time and living side by side against other types of content, be it documentary-type content, episodic content, and live around it. So I think we remain in our mission unchanged, our mission being to really maximize the commercial and promotional value of music video.”

You can hear David Bloom’s conversation with JP Evangelista of Vevo beginning at 10 am PT on Friday (Feb. 11), as part of Digital Entertainment World 2022.