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MTV will soon start to sell ads for music videos owned by Warner Music Group, the companies announced on Wednesday.

MTV will have exclusive rights to Warner Music's video ad inventory, Warner said in a statement. The move comes less than a year since Warner signed a similar agreement with Outrigger Media.

Rumors began circulating last week that Warner Music was shopping for a new means to sell ads. A music industry source said that Warner Music had spoken to music video portal Vevo about the possibility of that service selling Warner's ads.

Following a lengthy contract dispute … Read more

NEW YORK--YouTube has begun testing a new music feature designed to entice users to stay on the site longer.

YouTube Disco enables people to key an artist name or song title into a search field, and then it creates a playlist for them. Each clip will play automatically, one after the other, with no prompting from the user.

Users can also mix and match songs in their playlists. This is the kind of thing that people can fire up and let play for hours of free music listening. YouTube now sees hundreds of millions of visitors a month, but the … Read more

NEW YORK--It's hard to measure just how big a cultural force singer Lady Gaga has become, but start-up music-video site Vevo took a stab at it on Wednesday.

Ted Mico, executive vice president of digital for Interscope/Geffen, a music label owned by Universal Music Group, said at the Digital Music East conference that Lady Gaga's videos account for a quarter of Vevo's traffic.

Vevo was created by three of the largest record companies--Universal Music, Sony Music Entertainment, and EMI Music. Warner Music Group is in negotiations to join as well.

The service was the label partners' … Read more

Update: 8:30 a.m. 2-10-10: To include chart of ComScore numbers.

On the same day that Warner Music Group reported lackluster earnings, the third largest music recording company appears to have at least one thing to celebrate: dramatic new interest in the label's YouTube videos.

From December to January, the number of unique visitors to Warner's YouTube's clips appears to have more than doubled from 23.3 million to 47.5 million, according to ComScore. What that means is Warner's music videos are now the most popular on the Web. In one month, Warner has … Read more

I missed the live Grammy Awards telecast this year, but Monday at the office, one of my colleagues remarked about Pink's Cirque du Soleil-style performance, wondering if she'd been trained as a circus performer. Then, I saw several of my Facebook friends commenting that Taylor Swift should have learned how to sing before sharing the stage with Stevie Nicks. Much to my surprise, there were suddenly two Grammys videos I wanted to see.

I turned first to YouTube, but the first video I found of the Pink performance was appallingly low quality, like somebody had shot a video … Read more

Lady Gaga, the singing sensation and heir to Madonna's club-queen throne, is proving to be quite the technology fan.

Beats by Dr. Dre--the brand of headphones and electronic gear from rapper Dr. Dre--along with Monster and Universal Music Group producer Jimmy Iovine announced Tuesday that Lady Gaga would appear at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) on Thursday.

This follows the Lady's appearance at last month's launch party in New York for music-video start-up Vevo and a performance last year at DLD Starnight, a gathering of European techies. In addition, Gaga also has her own headphone … Read more

The music industry's patience with Muziic and the site's teenage founder may have finally run out.

Rio Caraeff, chief executive of Vevo, the recently launched Web site that features music videos from three of the top four recording companies, wants 16-year-old David Nelson to stop using the service's content and trademark. Caraeff e-mailed Nelson on Tuesday asking him to comply.

Nelson is the precocious high school coder who launched a music service last March that enables users to treat YouTube music videos in much the same way that song files are handled at iTunes. The videos can … Read more

Muziic, the YouTube-based music application created by teenage programmer David Nelson, has been an impressive piece of work with one drawback: the desktop application only runs on Windows. Not anymore! On Christmas day, the company officially launched a Web-based version of its service, and it compares very favorably with other free online music services.

Like the Muziic desktop app and U.K.-based TubeRadio.fm, the new Muziic Web player draws its content from YouTube, and allows you to queue songs and save playlists. But it's got a couple of interesting wrinkles.

First, you can get content from Vevo … Read more

Yesterday, I compiled my list of the five most welcome products for digital audio that came out in 2009. Today, I'm following it up with my list of the year's five biggest digital audio duds.

Zookz. The breathless pitch got me interested: a mysterious online service was getting ready to compete against subscription-based download service eMusic. But where eMusic limits users to a set number of downloads, this mystery service would offer unlimited music and movie downloads. How could this be? Wouldn't users just download all the material they wanted then cancel their subscriptions? How could content … Read more