Viktrs are reimagining music videos. Bringing a significant revenue stream to a seemingly undervalued digital asset, Viktrs have created something that puts the artist first and allows them to monetise their music videos, as well as drive major engagement. By giving audiences a richer video viewing experience, they provide artists with the opportunity to create new revenue streams, partnership opportunities, and to generate ethical insights.
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How did you get the idea for Viktrs?
Having been in the video world for a number of years I was shocked to learn that music videos didn’t really make money for artists and I wanted to change that. I’ve always loved rich video content and I wanted audiences to have the ability to answer the question ‘what’s that?’ while watching any video content. Music videos are the ultimate example of this when it comes to potential commercial value, and I think artists can really benefit from this technology.
What do you think will make this work in this market?
Some support and buy in from a few music industry legends that can be ‘lightning bolts’ for change. Many in the industry know a lot is broken, and I truly believe that we have created a platform that has the potential to deliver huge change in the music industry by unlocking the dormant value of videos.
We Want to be known as a good company, with transparency and fairness at the core of everything we do. I truly believe that fans and audiences want to have great discovery and engagement experiences. Knowing that their time, money and efforts are rewarding the right people – the artists and content creators themselves really encourages them to engage with and support their favourite artists.
How do you select your artists?
We work a lot with independent artists at the moment of all genres. But we are happy to work with artists of all sizes to be honest. The main qualifying factor is really that the artist wants to provide a richer experience to fans and is open to explore the potential for brand partnerships in the future.
Tell us more about the structure of the app and how it works for artists
Viktrs is actually built as embeddable tech, so it can sit on any website that wants to embed it, this is usually the artist’s own website, publishers and brand websites that feature in videos (as well as Viktrs.com). We put the video on sites that already have eyeballs. However, we are in the process of building an App and Viktrs.com to be a main platform where we will be able to invest in driving eyeballs and fans. This is the next big step for Viktrs.
For Artists we take a really simple approach which is to split all our revenues 50/50 at the moment. We want to be transparent and fair.
What is your stance on the streaming and revenue process and what would you change?
Of course we focus on the video streaming guys here, who I feel are the worst offenders on a ‘revenue per stream’ basis. This is predominantly due to the fact that they are advertising revenue models, and therefore you need millions of streams to ‘get paid a buck’. We believe that Viktrs can deliver at least 20x that revenue on a per stream basis without using adverts. We value every single stream and seek to drive the yield up on that basis.
Why do you focus on music videos specifically over other creatives?
The Viktrs mission is to be artist first and we will continue with this focus, however we are regularly approached now by brands and content creators (like influencers) from other categories and are happy to explore these enquiries with them. We have already done a few projects like this.
