Music Video Overview

In addition to distributing audio releases, we can deliver your label’s official music videos to a number of revenue-generating services.  A brief list of these services is provided below.  Your label manager will be able to advise you about which options may be appropriate for your videos.

You can apply to have your label’s channels invited to join the Kudos multi-channel network (MCN).  This enables you to monetise your video uploads as part of the YouTube partner program and also allows us to generate “audio videos” to be delivered to your channel automatically to promote your releases.  Kudos is a YouTube Certified company so we are able to offer expert advice regarding strategies for growing your audience and generating revenue on this platform.

There is more information about monetising music content on YouTube here.

VEVO is an online video platform specifically devoted to premium music content which is primarily served served through their network of official artistnameVEVO channels on YouTube.  For this reason videos which are supplied to VEVO should not also be uploaded directly to another YouTube channel.  VEVO are a completely separate entity from YouTube and Google and all the advertising that appears on their channels is sold by VEVO directly.  Because they only deal with high-quality music content, they generally attract premium advertisers.

Another advantage of VEVO channels is that they are independent of any particular label or supplier.  This allows an artist’s full repertoire of official video content to be hosted and monetised on a single channel, even though each video may be owned by a different label. VEVO distributes the revenue for each video to the correct rights-holder.  VEVO videos can also be transferred between rights-holders without the need to re-upload.

Kudos can deliver your artists’ music videos to VEVO even if their channel was initially created by another label or distributor.  If you have already supplied videos to VEVO through another distributor those can be transferred to Kudos as well. We can also set-up new channels for your artists on request (this takes 7-10 days).

Kudos also highlights videos to VEVO’s editorial team who select their favourite videos each week to be cross-promoted across their network.

Your music videos can be delivered to Apple to be made available for purchase on the iTunes download store and as part of the Apple Music streaming service.  Video streams on Apple Music generate a royalty in exactly the same way as an audio streams.

Note that Apple only accept videos that have been encoded and quality-assured by an Apple-approved encoding house.  Therefore, you will need to supply Kudos with a high-quality source that is suitable for transcoding to the proprietary format used on iTunes/Apple Music.  A full-resolution, lossless archiving format such as ProRes is ideal but any commonly used codec with sufficiently high bitrate to be “visually lossless” is usually acceptable.

The cost of encoding for Apple is £35 for HD video and £65 for 4K resolution.

Hi-Fi Music service TIDAL are also able to host music videos on their subscription-only streaming service and this can be a good way to achieve extra visibility on this platform.  Video streams on TIDAL also generate a royalty from a share of subscription revenue in the same way as audio streams.

Kudos Labels can submit Music Videos using this form.