Avril Lavigne To Score A $2 Million Pay Cheque From YouTube

BY Cam LindsayPublished Jul 22, 2008

Attention money-hungry musicians: it looks as though if you play your cards right and ensure every single possible avenue is covered when licensing your music, you can make millions off uploading a video to YouTube. So says Music Tank, which is reporting that Avril Lavigne is set to make a cool $2 million thanks to her video for the song "Girlfriend."

The music business-focused blog states that the hit single's 100 million views (which you can clearly see was rounded up, considering it currently sits at 93 million-plus) on the favourite video-sharing site has netted the Canadian mall punker the fortune, thanks to her management's wise strategies, which included a widespread coordinated fan campaign. Nettwerk Management CEO Terry McBride told MusicTank’s "Face To Face With The Millennials" that ”There’s about a $2 million cheque waiting for her for all her YouTube plays.”

The funny thing is, Nettwerk isn't done with the video. According to McBride, Nettwerk is now targeting the Far-East. Adds McBride: "We will start a Mandarin website (for Lavigne) with Mandarin ads and we will make a shitload of money, because 40 percent of her intellectual property value comes from Asia.”

Nettwerk has gained much praise for its savvy online marketing plans over the past year alone. According to figures given by Music Tank, the company "expects its revenue from digital to tip beyond 70 percent this year. That’s massively more than the 25.5 percent eMarketer forecasts the global music business will make from digital this year."

Discussing why the label has been so successful, McBride stressed that labels should offer song downloads for 25 cents, and albums for two dollars. "You’d see a huge shift," he says. "We haven’t even given kids the choice to show us this tipping point yet... the profit margin in the digital space is about 300 percent that inside the physical space.”

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