Meanwhile, Todd Porter will helm the first-ever music supervisor post at the agency. Porter, who’s been with GS&P for 10 years give or take, most recently served as music producer on spots including Frito-Lay “Made For Each Other”, Sprint “Anthem”, and Comcast “Big Day”. According to the announce, Porter’s new title calls for him to “work tightly with creatives” to ensure that the right music is found for each piece of work Goodby creates and he will help the agency work with musicians and artists to “develop relationships and opportunities for cross-promotion and endorsements for clients.”

In Los Angeles recently, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek talked about the halo effect that artists can experience on the application.  Cultivating fans in far-flung countries, generating upswings in related, non-recording purchases.  A return towards the album, and beyond that, a ripe community of downstream API developers.

Bloggers were lapping it up, even predicting an imminent launch in the US.  But Edgar Bronfman is over freemium, over the idea that somehow freebie music communities convert towards premium in a meaningful way.  Even in Europe, premium subscribers are a small percentage of the Spotify total (less than 4 percent), despite the swell of publicity and demand.

And, for that matter, advertisers are hardly banging down the door – while testing at Midem, the French version was mostly filled with Spotify ‘house ads’ and plugs for label content.  In a similar test last summer in London, the British version suffered a similar problem.

That was an issue Amanda Marks of Universal Music Group publicly raised last year.  More recently, Edgar Bronfman said it out loud, dismissing the freemium approach in no uncertain terms.  The quote has been hashed and rehashed, but neither are playing the tech-chic popularity contest.  They need to license concepts that make money, not win praise from Spotify worshipers and ‘with it’ bloggers.  At this point in the game, looking cool is an expensive endeavor.

But the buoyant hype around Spotify has a deadweight counterpart, an underachieving sibling that rarely gets mentioned these days.  As the drool drips on Spotify, a once-promising Rhapsody is getting spun off, zipped up and mailed away by RealNetworks and MTV Networks.  Even after millions in commitments and huge amounts of advertising.

Yet, subscribers slumped towards 675,000 at the end of last year, a drop of 13 percent year-over-year.  The number itself is hardly zero, but nothing near the initial expectations heaped upon it – and the broader subscription space – in the early 2000s.  Yet this is quite an excellent application, one that was well ahead of its time – but ultimately, a niche play.

So, what again is the difference between Spotify and Rhapsody?  Sure, Spotify is freemium, and Rhapsody starts the conversation with premium (limited trials and teasers notwithstanding).  But strip away those models, and the apps are quite similar.  Rhapsody was just as dazzling in 2002, just like Spotify splashed onto the scene in 2008.  But Rhapsody was always locked in its cage, away from freebie paws.

And maybe that’s the point.  The history on Rhapsody (and similar competitors) is all-too-familiar to Bronfman and other executives looking at the same problem.  And simply flipping the model around on the cloud hardly seems like the solution.

Paul Resnikoff, Publisher.

Separately, sources to Hits Magazine pointed to a splash event at Skylight Studios in lower Manhattan, and participation from leading independents, brands, and other advertising agencies.  That was later confirmed by an email from Vevo, which additionally pointed to an upcoming presence across vevo.com and youtube.com.

Currently, the venture involves Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group, though others are expected to join at a later date.  YouTube is powering the backend video technology.

Outside of launch and partner specifics, the challenge for Vevo is to find a way to better monetize music videos online.  That means sloughing away CPM-unfriendly elements associated with user-generated content, including affinity issues that emanate from loosely-regulated uploads and distasteful comments. Whether Vevo can create a neater, cleaner, and safer environment for advertisers remains unclear, though everyone involved has a great deal to gain from the effort.