Getting rich click by click
With one song, 34-year
old Park Jae-sang — better known as PSY — is set to become a millionaire from YouTube ads and iTunes downloads, underlining a shift in how money is being made in the music business. An
even bigger dollop of cash will come from TV commercials.
From just those sources,
PSY and his camp will rake in at least $7.9 million this year. But for online music
sales in South Korea, he’ll
earn less than $60,000.
Gangnam Style with its catchy tune and much imitated horse-riding dance is the most-watched video on YouTube ever.
The viral video has clocked more than 880 million YouTube views since its July release, beating Justin Bieber’s Baby, which racked up
more than 808 million views since February 2010. PSY’s official channel on YouTube, which curates his songs and videos of his concerts, has nearly 1.3 billion views.
TubeMogul, a video ad buying platform, estimates
that PSY and his agent YG Entertainment have raked in about $870,000 as their share of the revenue from
ads that appear with YouTube videos. The Google Inc.- owned video service keeps approximately half.
PSY and YG Entertain
ment also earn money from views of videos that parody
his songs.