The End of the Black Screen
You know the specific impotence of clicking on a music video and getting a black screen with a brief message that means, in plain English: wrong country, try again, idiot. Something you could have bought on a DVD single in a record store twenty years ago, now locked behind invisible licensing borders because the people who owned the rights couldn’t agree on who got paid what. The early internet offered a lot of small humiliations, but that one was particularly reliable.
VEVO launched in Germany in October 2013, which meant the specific absurdity of German geoblocking finally started to ease. The dispute between GEMA—Germany’s music licensing authority—and YouTube had been grinding on for years, making the country one of the worst places in the developed world to watch anything with a major-label soundtrack. Suddenly you could pull up music videos in decent quality without a proxy, without hunting through alternative platforms, without the ritual of the sorry-wrong-country screen.
The front page defaulted to Katy Perry and Robin Thicke and Naughty Boy, obviously—everything calibrated for the median teenager. But go deep enough into the archive and you’d find things you hadn’t seen in decent resolution since before the licensing wars started. Videos that had effectively been buried. The kind of thing you’d forgotten you were even missing.
Free music videos for everyone. A sentence that should have been unremarkable.