We always respect the artist's creative vision for thumbnail choice. If you are unhappy with the thumbnail which has been changed please contact Vevo Content Operations at content@vevo.com and we can change this back for you
The reason which this has been changed is due to an initiative that our Artist & Label Relations team has been working very closely with partners on - the main focus of these optimizations is to identify thumbnails that are more engaging (close-up faces, emotion) and will have higher click-thru from users.
Thumbnails that more accurately reflect the content of the video lead to higher retention from users which in turn impacts how the video surfaces in YouTube’s suggested video algorithm (which accounts for 70% of views of videos on Vevo).
The goal of these optimizations is to improve the performance of videos on YouTube, but if we don’t see the positive impact we anticipate (or if the artist has particularly negative feelings about the change), we can always revert to the original thumbnail. Here’s a good summary of the initiative and its positive impact:
https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/vevo-video-thumbnails-youtube-optimization-1203186909/