Verizon just announced a deal with Warner to sell music video downloads for $3.99 a pop (or about double that of a ringtone). This may be good news for labels and bad news for music distributors. Good news because labels may get to set a value for music videos, which they have typically given away as promos (despite their costing more to produce than the track). [This has always been kind of a paradox to me -- you'll need to pay to download or stream the new Greend Day single, but you can download/stream the music video all you want.]

I'm going to guess that big distributors of music videos used to paying little to nothing for music videos -- MTV, AOL, Yahoo -- may get grandfathered in. (These sites are streaming hundreds of millions of videos apiece each month...Imagine if they had to pay the labels even a few cents per stream...) But new distributors wanting to promote music via music videos may now be asked to pay up from labels seeing this as a potential revenue stream, and pointing to a high profile player like Verizon, which sets a precedent.

Then again, maybe this only applies to mobile downloads, and so music videos will continue to be free online...