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Vevo is still searching for singular status in the online music world, but its hunt for a permanent CEO is over.
Vevo, whose catalog of top music videos makes it one of the most-watched companies on YouTube, named Erik Huggers as chief executive Thursday.
Vevo is a powerful force in online music, as the official provider of many of the Internet’s most-viewed videos. But the company is grappling to find a business in its own right outside the world of YouTube. Vevo has benefited as consumers increasingly turn to the Internet to watch and listen to music — its videos rack up 11 billion views every month. But much of its traffic comes through YouTube, where Vevo has less control over the revenue it can squeeze out of that viewership.
Its owners — Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, YouTube parent Google and Abu Dhabi Media — failed to sell Vevo last year, and longtime chief Rio Caraeff departed in the November. Vevo’s chief financial officer, Alan Price, has been serving as interim CEO since then.
Huggers previously ran Intel’s effort to launch an Internet-delivered TV service called OnCue, a unit Intel sold to Verizon as it switched strategies to focus on its core business of chips. Huggers rose to prominence as the executive who launched the BBC’s iPlayer online service, a vanguard of online television streaming.
In his new role, Huggers will be charged with improving the Vevo service and expand the company’s relationships with others, Vevo said in a statement.
Vevo also noted that its catalog of 140,000 music videos, original programming, and live concerts has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue since its launch in 2009, and said it has paid half a billion dollars since its founding to rights owners, artists, and songwriters. Despite all of that success, Vevo is not profitable.
Lately, record labels and artists have raised more doubts about why they should play nice with free streaming services, as those unpaid options have failed to turn people into paying subscribers as the industry hoped. Artist Jay-Z relaunched streaming-music service Tidal last month as an artist-owned alternative to those unpaid options.
Huggers has faced challenges in the past. At Intel, he led the company’s over-the-top subscription-based television service, saying that it would be an alternative to traditional cable and satellite for those who wanted to stream television. Before that offering could launch, Intel sold it to Verizon, where he stayed to help continue to build the streaming service, called OnCue, until his departure last year.
