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“Google used to be a “good beats evil” business. It profited by doing good, and creating better sets of economics. That was yesterday. Today, increasingly, Google is an ‘evil subsidizes good’ business. It’s not so different from Coke. The historic, globe-spanning bad stuff Coke does — selling toxic sugar-water to kids and the poor — subsidizes a threadbare patch of good stuff: a handful of spare change for charitable giving and public partnerships. Increasingly, the evil stuff Google does — supporting censorship, selling more and more toxic ads, squeezing suppliers and turning a blind eye — subsidizes a shrinking green patch of good stuff, like investing in the Mozilla Foundation.”

And that, says Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab, in Harvard Business, can’t be good.

Enter Vevo, the UMG, Sony, Google music video app that’s not a business-to-consumer play, but more of a “business-to-business arrangement” and “Google’s biggest mistake to date”.

It “Vevo violates Google’s most basic principles,” he says, going on >>>

The fundamental problem with Vevo is simple: it’s just a new “distribution channel” for the same old toxic junk. There’s no innovation of any kind at its heart. It sets no incentives for better stuff to be made. Here’s a simple example: We all know copyright’s deeply broken, but instead of innovating new kinds of property rights, Vevo’s built on copyright. You can’t even access it from outside the US. Just like McDonald’s selling fake “cappuccinos” isn’t exactly innovative, neither is a new channel to distribute the latest Kanye West video.

Because it’s unnovative, Vevo fails to address the music industry’s big problem: investing in Kanye Wests is a poor proposition. It requires huge marketing expenditure, only to deliver ever more meager, fleeting returns — usually propped up by gaming the charts. That’s the essence of thin value, and the 21st century demands thicker value. But Vevo actually enhances the incentives to create thin value, by providing yet another marketing “channel.” Vevo props up a dead, decaying business model — instead of seeking paths to one built on radically more awesome music in the first place.

In the final analysis, “Vevo’s ‘evil’ for a simple reason,” says Haque, adding:

“The music industry has long hit a trifecta of thin value — crappy music, ripped-off artists, and ethically dubious tactics. Vevo provides new a playing field for this game of value destruction to go on (and on). And in that failure to better yesterday lies the beginning of the end of Google’s greatness.

“So the question is this: Can you surpass the lame, obsolete industrial economics of the old Coke?”

No need to stay tuned.