Would You Pay $2.99 a Month to See Music Videos 72 Hours Ahead of Everyone Else?

Nope. Not me. But that’s exactly what Universal and Warner are hoping to sell through Vessel, a music subscription service.  They’re hoping to beat YouTube at their own game by offering exclusive video content.

You can sign up for free to get a whack of standard Vevo content. But for $2.99 a month, you’ll have access to “windowed” content, i.e. access to new material 72 hours before they show up anywhere else.  It could be anything from a new music video to…well, something else.  (Interesting idea, but won’t people just rip this material and stick it up on YouTube? Just askin’…)

Where Vessel hopes to score is with their payouts to content creators. Sixty percent of subscription revenue will go to rightsholders along with 70% of all the advertising revenue generated by their content.  That’s substantially more than YouTube 55%.  For every 1,000 views, the creators should earn about $50 USD.  And there’s an incentive for rightsholders to go out and convert new users. Every new convert will be worth between $5 and $10.

Will it work?  We’ll see. Read more at Music Business Worldwide.