On Vevo, ‘Gangnam Style’ Is the Viral Video That Never Was

What was the year’s most popular music video online?

The answer would seem obvious: “Gangnam Style” by the South Korean rapper-clown Psy, which in just a few months has racked up 942 million views, the most of any clip in YouTube’s history, redefining the scale of a viral hit.

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But the song is conspicuously absent from one year-end Top 10 list — the one produced by Vevo, a site that uses YouTube as its primary streaming platform and has tried to establish itself as the home of music videos online. Vevo’s list is topped by Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” which has 358 million views and, at least until “Gangnam Style” came along, seemed about as viral as a video could be.

The reason has to do with Vevo’s ownership, and how it gets the videos it plays. It is mostly owned by Sony and Universal, the two biggest record companies, and it does not have video licensing deals with every label. The biggest gap is the Warner Music Group, which includes superstars like Green Day and Bruno Mars. But there are also thousands of small labels and production companies that post videos on YouTube but lack deals with Vevo. The South Korean company that originally released “Gangnam Style” is one of them.

Once Psy got an American record deal through Universal Republic — and found an American manager in Scooter Braun, the social media mastermind behind Ms. Jepsen and Justin Bieber — “Gangnam Style” made it onto Vevo. But that did not help its year-end ranking on the site, where on Thursday afternoon its official play counter read, “0 views.” A spokeswoman for the company attributed that number to a technical error.

Vevo — which, in addition to Sony’s and Universal’s majority shares, is partly owned by Abu Dhabi Media — is in negotiations with YouTube over the licensing deals that will allow the service’s videos to keep streaming through YouTube, which is owned by Google.

Digital Sales Up at Warner Music: At the Warner Music Group, sales of digital music were up over the last year, and “more than offset” the continuing decline in sales of CDs and other physical formats, the company reported on Thursday.

Warner had revenue just below $2.3 billion from its recorded music division for its fiscal year ended in September, down 3 percent from the year before. Within that total, income from digital music — from download stores like iTunes and streaming services like Spotify — was $864 million, up 13 percent for the year.

That digital music revenue made up for losses from CDs, the company said: in the United States, digital sales represented 53.8 percent of the company’s revenue in recorded music, the first time it was more than half for a full year. But other businesses, like licensing and income from so-called 360 contracts (which let the company earn money from artists’ tours, merchandise and other deals), dragged the recorded music unit down.

Warner’s music publishing division had a 4 percent decline in revenue for the year, to $524 million. Over all, the group’s revenue was $2.8 billion, down 3 percent for the year. Its operating income was up 241 percent, to $109 million, and the company reported a net loss of $112 million, an improvement from its $205 million net loss the year before.

Warner was a publicly traded company from 2005 to 2011, when it was bought for $3.3 billion by Access Industries, a holding company controlled by the Russian-born investor Len Blavatnik. It continues to report its accounts, however, because of its public debt obligations.

Last.fm Scales Back: Last.fm, a music streaming service owned by CBS, is cutting back some of its features around the world “due to licensing restrictions,” the service announced.

In the United States, Britain and Germany, users can still listen to free music (with ads) through Last.fm’s Web site. But its desktop application version, introduced this year, will now only be available by subscription, as the service has already done in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Brazil. The service will be discontinued in all other countries, with the changes taking effect next month, the company announced on Thursday.

Last.fm, founded in Britain in 2002, was a pioneer in social listening online, by keeping track of what songs users listened to (“scrobbling”) and making those lists available to other users. That feature is integrated with many other streaming services, like Spotify and Rdio, and Last.fm was bought by CBS in 2007 for $280 million.

But in the United States, at least, the cost of music licenses has become a hotly debated issue, with Pandora Media, the leading Internet radio service, pushing for lower royalty rates.