YouTube And The Attention Economy

This is the third in the series of posts exploring how the music industry can better leverage the potential of the YouTube economy.  You can see the first post here and the second here.

Short form video is accelerating at a rapid pace, racking up 4.2 trillion views in the first half 2015.  While challengers Facebook, Snapchat and others now account for just over half of that total, few platforms of scale yet provide content creators and owners comparable ability to build engaged audiences and income.  For music the situation is even more pronounced – no other platform is even on the same lap of the race (and I include Vevo as an extension of YouTube). YouTube is the most popular online music destination by far (46% of consumers use it regularly) and its role for Digital Natives cannot be exaggerated – 65% of US under 25’s use YouTube…