Viva Vevo?

Looks as if Universal Music Group has another online music project in the works. Vevo is a dedicated music video site that reportedly will launch by the end of this year. Question is, will the other labels join in?

How important is Vevo? If you want to go by press coverage, Vevo got a major boost in public image May 15 when the Wall Street Journal devoted a huge chunk of space to the yet-to-launch video site described as an effort to “present music videos in a controlled setting.”

In other words, the label is creating a site where operators, not users, determine the video inventory. One of the problems encountered by Google-owned YouTube is that potential advertisers are leery of user-contributed content.

Sure, that may be a Green Day music video on YouTube, uploaded by someone called Number1GDFAN, but there’s no guarantee that 2 minutes into video the scene won’t flip to some guy showing off his homemade flame thrower. Like Forrest Gump’s often-quoted remark about a box of chocolates, sometimes you never know what you’ll get on YouTube.

In fact, Universal is working with Google to develop Vevo with the expectation that the new site’s “controlled setting” environment will allow the label to charge higher ad rates than the current YouTube norm. Kind of like Hulu, but no TV shows and no movies. Just music.

Of all the major labels, Universal has been one of the more aggressive when it comes to online strategy. The company, along with Sony-BMG, is partly responsible for Nokia’s “Comes With Music” promotion where buyers of certain Nokia cell phones get almost unlimited downloads for a period after the purchase.

During the late ’90s, Universal was also the home of Jimmy and Doug’s Farm Club, a Web effort promoting a kind of pre-American Idol talent competition where the winner received a recording contract. Shortly before its demise, Farm Club morphed into a somewhat experimental music-streaming service utilizing UMG recordings. That is, until complaints from music publishers forced an end to the endeavor.

Then there’s that entire episode in 2001 when Universal Music’s parent company, then known as Vivendi Universal, purchased MP3.com for $372 million but ended up selling the assets to CNET.

In other words, Universal has had its ups and downs in Webdom, and no one is predicting Vevo’s success or failure. However, the smart money says the label must get others to follow its lead in order for the video site to succeed. Universal is only one of the four major labels and there’s no indication whether EMI, Sony-BMG and Warner Music Group will also contribute content.

“There isn’t really a precedent for a major record label building a digital service which ends up as a sort of neutral arbiter for the other labels,” Forrester Research vice president and research director Mark Mulligan told the Journal, adding that Vevo may succeed, but “the odds are against them.”

Napster’s $5 Deal

Been thinking about those online music subscriptions where $10 or more per month gives you unlimited downloads? Napster just raised the subscription bar with a $5 subscription fee.

Of course, those unlimited downloads for a monthly payment come with at least one string attached. Most subscription services, including Best Buy-owned Napster, employ digital rights management technology that requires you to keep your subscription current in order to keep the music playing. Cancel your subscription and all those tracks you downloaded suddenly go silent.

Needless to say, it’s the DRM wrapping that comes with subscription tracks that keeps the downloads from playing on the world’s most popular personal player – Apple’s iPod.

Napster’s new $5 subscription, which launched May 19, doesn’t deep-six the DRM, but it does have an added feature that will make some songs compatible with iPods. That’s right. Some songs will play on iPods, but not all songs. Or even most of them.

Confused? Here’s the game plan.

The new subscription lets you stream tracks from Napster’s 7 million song catalog, listen to more 60 commercial-free radio stations and more than 1,400 “expertly programmed” playlists. Of course, streaming means just that. You can listen to the tracks, but you can’t take them with you.

However, the new subscription also gives you five DRM-free downloads that will play on just about any personal player, iPod and iPhone included. That’s five songs for five bucks per month. Did that perk your interest?

“There’s no need to settle for 30-second clips to decide if you want to buy a song,” said Napster CEO Chris Gorog. “For five bucks now you can have access to our entire music catalog and get five MP3s to add to your permanent collection.”

The Name Game

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” was the caption of the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon depicting one canine explaining to another pooch how the ‘Net treats everyone the same, regardless of name, profession and social status.

But while the cartoon was a comment on anonymity, today’s social networking sites are dealing with the exact opposite – common folks masquerading as big-name celebs.

Kanye West recently took Twitter to task for allegedly allowing a user to register under his name. Other famous folks impersonated on Twitter include Bill Gates, Condoleezza Rice and actor Christopher Walken. It just goes to show you that, when given the choice, some Netizens would rather be someone other than themselves. Preferably, someone famous.

So it’s kind of ironic that online social gathering spot Facebook, while attempting to remove false screen names, deleted a few bona fide accounts as well.

Like the stay-at-home mom who discovered she was locked out of her Facebook account. Normally, this might be more of an inconvenience than a tragedy, except she also used her Facebook account for running a jewelry design business out of her home. Her name? Alicia Istanbul.

“They should at least give you a warning, or a at least give you the benefit of the doubt,” Istanbul said. “I was on it all day. I had built my entire social network around it. That’s what Facebook wants.”

Istanbul was mistakenly snared in Facebook’s latest attempt to purge its site of fake accounts. In fact, the social site has a “blacklist” of names, mostly famous monikers, that people can’t use. However, according to Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt, incidents like what happened to Istanbul’s account are extremely rare.

“The vast, vast vast majority of people we disable we never hear from again,” Schnitt said.

For Facebook, it’s all about the name. The social networking site wants only real people registering for accounts, something that’s more than a little difficult to accomplish when you consider the company has about 850 employees worldwide and more than 200 million users.

But try as Facebook employees might to rid the environment of posers and fakers, Associated Press reports that it just can’t cover all the bases. Or, in this case, names.

For example, according to AP, an informal search revealed more than 27 people with the last name of “Stupid,” 20 accounts listed as “I.P. Freely” and 13 people networking socially under the name of “Seymour Butts.”

Facebook says once it disables an account, it’s up to the user to have it reinstated, and in some cases users must fax a copy of a government-issued I.D. to regain entry to their pages.

For Istanbul, it took three weeks to convince Facebook her last name was real. During that time she wrote e-mails to the company as well as snail-mail letters to Facebook’s 12 execs. When she absolutely, positively needed some face time on Facebook, she used her husband’s account.

“I think they just assume you can’t have an interesting name,” Istanbul said. “I kept my maiden name because it’s such an interesting name, I didn’t want to give it up. And now I am having to defend my name.”