30frames

This is sort of “part deux” for my preaching to the choir post from last week.

Several commenters here and on antville took me to task for not acknowledging the power YouTube’s “viral video” effect. It is true I neglected to include the upside of video sharing in the last post. I was lazy, the post was already long and I believe viral videos are much, MUCH less infecting than many people believe.

When Gutenberg invented the printing press and movable type – it was decades before someone came up with the idea for page numbers, so those original, un-page numbered books were far less useful than they would be once “book OS technology” had the kinks worked out. Today, we are in that “no page numbers yet” stage for the internet. The technology exists, but the way it will REALLY be used once it becomes fully integrated into our lives has not yet been established. In 2007, the intratubes (and viral video) are still in their pre-adolescent stages and there is no way to know exactly how they will turn out.

Reason #1 why I largely dismiss the power of viral videos:
They have not made anyone on the music-making end of things much money as of yet. The YouTube guys are billionaires, but that hasn’t helped Weird Al make any scratch off of “White and Nerdy” despite the fact that the web clip has been watched more than 6 million times. Clicks are NOT cash. Attention does not pay the bills. (Hey, I love it when my blog gets an extra hundred hits, but I can’t use that to pay my rent, unless my landlord starts taking GoogleAd Sense.)

Part of this is on the music industry. Why can’t record companies turn people sharing video clips into a living for recording artists? Because labels are run in old fashioned ways by old fashioned people. Maybe someone will turn this around, but that looks to be a long ways off.

Reason #2 why I largely dismiss the power of viral videos:
Even hyper-successful viral videos have made little to no impact at retail. OkGo is the best example to date of the positive power of viral videos and even they have not been all that successful. Here is a blurb from their (press release-ish) wikipedia page:

"After the band's performance at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards, their album moved up to #2 on the ITunes Music Store album sales charts (as of September 3, 2006). Their album sold 8,250 units in the following week, a 95% increase over the prior week, rocketing from #87 to #69 on the Billboard 200 album chart, the highest position ever achieved by any OK Go album to date."

Wow, I would not call moving from 87 to 69 “rocketing,” especially following an appearance on the VMA show. This is NOT all that impressive to me – or the record labels, either, I would imagine. These numbers are very good for a small indie band and all that, but if this the BEST case one can make for viral video it is not a very strong case at all.

The treadmills video has been watched over 11 million times and OkGo even won the Grammy for video of the year (as well they should have, IMO) so they have gotten lots of attention – too bad more people didn’t actually pay for the music. This is not a rip on OkGo – but rather pointing out that the concept of viral videos, even in the best of best of best case scenarios – has a long way to go. OkGo created something great (along with a far better written and far more market friendly song than most viral visds are attached to) that points the way to where the industry might/should/will go in the future. But Ben Franklin and his kite getting over with the key, is still a long way from people having electric bug-zappers on their patios.

Many, many bands have tried to get the same viral video buzz and only OkGo has turned their clip into mainstream attention. Bands expecting YouToogle to make them stars is like school kids expecting that they will be NBA/NFL stars when they grow up. It might actually happen to a tiny handful of athletic hopefuls, but the percentages are not in the kid’s favor. AND (to extend the metaphor oven further) the OkGo example shows that the rare kid that does make the pros will spend his time on the bench earning the league minimum salary. Kids are better off studying for a career other than sports if they want to stay above the poverty line and bands are better off trying to get signed to a major label and go about things the more “traditional” route if they wanna stay above the poverty line.

The viral video might (and I stress "might") help out a baby band that few have heard of, but it holds almost no value for an established band or artist - like Fall Out Boy or My Chemical Romance or Ludacris. The music industry, as currently constructed, is set up to make money off the later kind of artists - not the unknowns. To the music industry, viral video looks like something that "helps panda bears manage their stock portfolio" - a solution to a problem they don't know or care about. The music industry is definitely changing, and possibly to something where pandas need to check their mutual funds, but I doubt viral videos will still be the rage when that happens.

Reason #3 why I largely dismiss the power of viral videos:
Because people on the internet think it is a sure thing. When everyone tells me something is a can’t miss deal, (eToys, anyone?) I get very suspicious.

"Viral video" is the kind of catch-phrase that jumps into marketing vocabularies - ala synergy, click-through, tweens and so on. There is certainly some value in all these concepts, but when they become "hot" - they get over-used and beaten into the ground in the rush to apply their new media-ness to any and every situation. Remember when CD-ROMs and those added value CDs were going to change the record retail game? Maybe viral video will be the thing to make that change, but so far, I see zero signs that it has happened.

Labels: antville, controversy, music video, viral video, YouTube