30frames

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

There has been much talk about YouToogle and possible replacements for the titan of web video. No one is happy with the picture quality of Das Tube – other than R Kelly who enjoys the graininess because it allows Kells to claim that ain’t him sexing the underage girls on the home video.

There will someday (and soon) be a new and improved YouTube. Maybe Google will upgrade their new purchase to HD or maybe some other new site will come in and have better tech that pushes out Das Tube. It will happen, but the details don’t matter. Not to me and not to the regular people who have made YouTube the hit it is.

I posted that in December of 2006. That is three years ago (checks math). Yes, three years ago. Nothing has changed except that the R Kelly joke is stale and the name of ‘possible replacement’ music video site has changed.

In 2006 I was commenting on the hype around a site called Zudeo which was going to change the face of music on the interwebs. Zudeo is currently down for maintenance so we can’t be sure if it has accomplished its mission of global domination.

The reason this has re-entered my egg nog and everclear infused brain is because in December 2009 we have a new and improved video savior – Vevo. This new site was started by Universal Music Group and has most of the significant labels on board, other than Warners. Saint Bono has called Vevo “the birth of a new model for our industry,” probably while UMG executives gave him the ‘thumbs up’ from the side of the stage. They even got some of that Ay-Rabb money to help launch the latest game changer.

The problem is that Vevo seems to be the exact same thing as the last UMG ‘solution’ – PluggedIn. If you don’t remember PluggedIn – don’t feel bad, I didn’t either.

Vevo has now launched and they have some exclusive content (for how long?) and the videos do look sharp and the lay-out is nice. Is this enough of a ‘plus’ for web users to stop searching and watching on the YouTube/Google axis? Google searches also turn up clips on daily motion, vimeo, vodpod and others - something that is an Achilles heel for Vevo, since their catalog is relatively limited. In 2010, are users interested in (willing to?) searching more than once?

When I was poking fun of Zudeo three years ago, the issue I harped on was compatibility. The question back then was would all videos play on all browsers, and what if you had a Mac or a Windows machine? Those nuts and bolts tech issues are largely gone (Thanks, You Tube) but Vevo, with all it’s high-def-iness, still seems like a solution to a problem from half a decade ago. Why does anyone (not employed at Universal) need another music video site?

It seems that the label/artists are going to get a slightly higher ad rate for the videos seen on Vevo versus the same clips watched on YouTube. More ad revenue is great, but how will people find these videos if they don’t pop up in the major search engines? What will make music fans go to Vevo rather than (the very similar) mtvmusic.com or YouTube?

Maybe I am missing something, but this sure seems the same as it ever was.


The video above was found with three clicks via Google and it plays on dailymotion.

Read the 30frames post from December 2006 right here.

And VideoStatic has a different (and more thoughtful) perspective here.

Labels: insider, media, music video, video link, viral video, YouTube

If you read this blog, I am sure you have heard about the new music video site 99dollarmusicvideos. I realize I am a bit late to the game since the site has been getting talked up on Videostatic, Idolator and the Ville (where 99$V has drawn less commentary than the ‘controversy’ about Kanye and data-moshing).

The idea behind 99$V is a clever one and will surely draw attention to a few interesting directors and recording artists. This kind of site is not the ‘cause’ of anything bad, but it does indicate where the music video industry is right now – and that is no place very good. This is essentially a video contest, and (as I have written before) those do attract some attention but usually don’t make the best videos.

My first thought was that the glossy intro graphics package on the site (you can see it at the head of a ‘making of’ video) cost way more than the video that followed. Heh, irony.

Any video created within the constraints of the website’s rules – one day shoot, one day edit, spend only $99 AND make a video of how the shoot went down to prove the budget was followed) – is destined to have limitations. That is fine in theory, but for a director, putting an artificially limited video out there for all to see might be problematic – even if doing it in a day for less than a hundred bucks IS an accomplishment. Kind of like going on a job interview after strictly allowing yourself just 15 minutes to shave, shower AND type up a resume – that rumpled and harried person is you, but maybe not the best way to get hired in the future.

The triangle. Good, fast or cheap – you can pick two but not three. Guess which one is gonna get left out of the $99 videos shot in 24 hours?

The formula on the site works great – if you want to see the drama of 'the struggle' like a reality TV show. Watching the designer-contestants on 'Project Runway' rush to make a cocktail dress out of recycled plastics and $17 worth of buttons in less than four hours is much, much more interesting than seeing the resultant garment. Or wearing the half-junk dress, for that matter.

The goal of the 99$V site is to get viewers for Verizon ads – which is a fine and noble goal. The best way to do that is to show us the drama of a harried director grinding to get the video done in the allotted time for the tiny budget. If the resulting music video helps the band's (or the director's) career very much is secondary.

The ‘behind the scenes’ videos are more intriguing (at least to my drunken eye) than the actual music videos. More than anything, maybe that shows us where music videos are at these days.

Labels: contest, hipsters, insider, music video, video link, viral video

Good news, DJ Khaled is still alive, and nowhere near the white Bentley roaming LA in a slow speed pursuit. But, the Miami based DJ/producer might have been depressed because the best-ever Khaled music video got made – and he wasn’t even in it.

On Saturday Night Live, the Lonely Island guys did a digital short for a song of their new album, Incredibad. The song “I’m on a Boat” is just about the best Khaled song ever with shouty ultra-obvious raps and Auto-tuned choruses from T-Pain. Yes, T-Pain.

It speaks to the state of the music industry when Khaled, Gil Green and all the other Miami-philes can’t muster a budget this big for a ‘real’ music video, but these comedy guys can. Damn, Sandberg even got a helicopter shot.

It will really be something if Incredibad punks the new U2 album opening week.

Watch the "I'm on a Boat" video here.

Labels: controversy, music video, u2, video link, viral video

Happy New Year to all!

Hey, I got some mail. Okay, not really mail, but over on the ‘Ville, a poster named budget added the following comment:

Would you please weigh in on this article: Music Industry Looks To Internet For Revival Particularly this quote: "Universal Music, the industry leader, has said that it makes “tens of millions of dollars” from YouTube." We're making 10k videos that end up making their labels millions of dollars! We're still getting screwed over!!!

Okay, here is me weighing in …

First of all, click on over to the Financial Times and read the brief article. While doing that, remember it is the FINANCIAL F^&%ING TIMES. Everything in that article is skewed towards investors and potential investors. If ‘High Times’ magazine covered the recent Presidential election (maybe they did, my subscription ran out) you can bet that HT focused on which candidate would make it easier for their readership to get high. Financial Times has just as skewed a world view. FT is all about telling investor/readers where they might (or might not) want to put their money. The info in that article is bound to be massaged, but doesn’t mean it ain’t useful.

The fact that Warner and Youtube/Google are beefing over the percentages means that there IS some money to be made from the ads that run over and alongside the videos. The “Music industry looks to internet for revival” headline at least seems reasonable. But how much money is really there?

This is where the waters will get murky. You gotta remember the recent financial collapse was preceded by lots and lots and lots of articles in FT and Wall Street Journal about how the markets and the economy and the mortgage universe was doing just peachy. The financial press is full of ridiculously upbeat projections and predictions that are not justified by real-world facts – these kind of publications are often more cheerleaders than news sources. (Note that I have taken down last year’s prediction that the shoot for the film ‘Vicky Christina Barcelona’ would turn into a Penelope Cruz – 30f – Scarlett Johansson sandwich. Sigh.)

Anyway – take any and all income predictions and earnings estimates with a Fat Joe-sized grain of salt. Here is the quote that perturbed mr. budget - “Universal Music, the industry leader, has said that it makes “tens of millions of dollars” from YouTube.” Now contrast that with “Hulu and YouTube would make about $70m and $100m respectively in US advertising revenues in 2008” from a little farther down in that same article. How do those things fit together? (Hint, they don't.)

Now, Uni is a big player, but if YouToogle as a whole is making $100million per year (and this estimate might be as cooked up as the financial health of AIG and Fannie Mae) then how could Universal possibly be getting that much? I am unsure what the sharing arrangement is, but if YouTube makes a hundred mil, the copyright owners probably don’t get an equal share – so the copyright owners of YouTube clips can’t be getting the ‘same’ $100 mil, can they?

Back to Universal. Uni’s supposed “tens of millions” means multiples of ten, right? So “tens of millions” means at least twenty in my book. That is 20% of YouTube’s (alleged) total revenue (and forgetting for now that the split is unlikely to be 50/50). I imagine Uni might earn 20% of the music video based revenue on YouToogle, but music videos are a fraction of all the content on YouTube. A popular fraction to be sure, but if YouToogle brings in $100m, much of that must come from wedding videos, skateboarding tips and dogs eating burritos, right?

This leads me to the conclusion that it is highly unlikely that Universal makes what they are saying off of YouTube videos. There are plenty of other claims in that article that can be parsed, but you get the point. Like fisherman, businessman make big, boastful claims. Especially if they are trying to convince shareholders that all is well.

Now, onto the most salient part of budget’s comment/question: “We're making 10k videos that end up making their labels millions of dollars! We're still getting screwed over!!!”

Yes, plenty of directors have budgets of $10k or less to make videos, and these do end up on the internet and they might be earning the record label some cash. But my guess would be that Britney, Jay-Z and their fellow megastars earn the majority of the online revenue for a label and plenty of the low-end jobs (let’s say the $10k range) attract way, way less viewers and thus less ad revenue. It is unlikely that Universal is earning their (fictional?) tens of millions off of the low-end jobs. Long tail and all that.

The real reason that MV budgets were big in the 90s was competition. To get played on MTV, a video had to beat out rival videos for limited air time. TRL and other prime spots on Viacom's cable-waves were prime real estate. As more and more videos got made, the labels had to spend more and more to attract the eye of MTV’s programmers and win those scarce slots. This led to the kind of budgetary arms race that brought us Puffy’s ‘Victory’ and O-Town’s ode to nocturnal emissions ‘Liquid Dreams.’

But, now, with the ‘air time’ on the ‘Net being limitless – why should a label pull out the budgetary big guns? A once scarce resource (exposure for the videos) has suddenly become free. The labels need to attract eyeballs, but the eyeballs they are after are now the end consumers and not a conference room full of people at 1515 Boadway, and winning that attention seems to be based more on having a hot song or a visual hook (i.e. synchronized treadmills) rather than massive post effects or stunts like the ‘big’ videos of old.

So, budget, does that help any? It doesn’t make that $10k budget stretch any farther, but hopefully you’ll see that the labels likely aren’t raking in the money off Youtube clicks for Shwayze. To be honest, $10k is probably an appropriate amount to spend on a music video if the label is hoping to get a few dollars back from YouTube advertising.

If we don’t like the budgets the labels offer, we can always turn the jobs down. Ha.

Anyway, I won’t turn down questions. Send me an email or drop a comment below.

Labels: label, mail, MTV, music video, philosophy, prod co, TRL, video link, viral video, YouTube

There is this dim-bulb chick from a dopey reality show who has recently made a “music video.” The clip is not very good, but if you see how they made the thing – this is no kind of surprise. The song is goofy and the video is worse – even the fact that the video’s star is a blonde in a skimpy swimsuit showing off the goods in a way that seems like it is aimed at getting clicks 9and other one-handed activity) on dailymotion rather than airplay on music television.

My point in bringing this up is not to pile on the already well-mocked artist/song/video. There are plenty of other people doing that. The reason I mention this clip is because I have come to see the response to this video as a good thing. Not because people are finally rejecting reality TV trash (ha, like that is gonna happen) – but because …

Everyone seems to realize this is NOT a real music video. I was actually surprised that the general public could tell this waste of pixels apart from a genuine video. Pleasantly surprised, indeed.

It makes me happy that people can discern a real music video shoot (like Timbaland – complete with professionals shouting in funny accents) apart from this other thing. Though one could speculate about who's body is more artificial - Timbo or Heidi.



On a side note, there is a five part interview series with Spike Jonze, Kanye and special guest Hype over on vbs. A cool bit of insight into the thought process of a star who really cares about his videos. Thanks to najork for posting on antville.

Labels: Heidi Montag, media, music video, Spike Jonze, Timbaland, trainwreck, video link, viral video, YouTube

Gotta love Busta Rhymes getting down like a Senator. No, not in a "wide stance" kind of way but in a "Intranets is a series of tubes" kind of way.

Check out the onsmash clip of Bussa Buss decrying the good ol' days (hey, that's my gig) and remembering the time when he spent millions on recording before "the computer caused that fuck up." Busta is, as always, hilarious and gives voice to the rarely heard "wealthy celebrity" demographic. Plus he is right about them ringtones!

Absorb the knowledge and be prepared for NSFW language.

Labels: Busta Rhymes, celebrity, insider, music video, video link, viral video, YouTube

Before you read this, you have to check out James’ post over on SRO. Seriously, this whole post is me arguing with that post, so you better read that first or this will make even less sense that I normally make. And it's pretty good, too.

James is definitely correct that MTV was never perfect. Many people in the MV community have an incredible amount of nostalgia for a Viacom sponsored Utopia where clips ran like honey and it was always “120 Minutes” (but never “Yo! MTV Raps” – hmm). James is right, we all need to let that fantasy go. “Where Have You Gone, Nina Blackwood?!?!”

That being said, MTV hasn’t always sucked. James writes that MTV was flawed from its inception, but I completely disagree. Sitting through three hours of Erasure and Lionel Richie videos to get to ZZ Top is obviously not gonna work today. But back then, it was great. I eagerly sat through the clips I didn’t like (and probably learned a lot, like sometimes it rains men, whatever that means) because it was way better than doing my homework. Would that young version of me have preferred to click and watch “Hot For Teacher” over and over again? Sure, but he might have never seen a music video once he learned he could also click and see porn, but I digress.

Early Roman sewers would seem terrible by modern standards (now there's a digression). For more info, check sewerhistory.org. Those early sewers would not meet today’s building codes, but at the time, they were an advancement that allowed for urban living – where cities could grow large without disease wiping out swaths of the downhill population every summer. Early MTV, was a leap forward – but still not what viewers want today (insert river of shit joke here).

Okay, sewers may be a stretch. Watch an old music video and see how long the shots last. They hold on some angle as the singer awkwardly lip-syncs, unsure if they are supposed to faux-sing AT the lens or not – and the shot holds and holds and it seems like forever. Tastes change. What worked back when doesn’t work now – but that doesn’t mean that it sucked back then. Our perspective has changed, but the history has not.

You could argue that YouToogle is great for viewers – we can see what we want, when we want it. That certainly is progress. But what is convenient for us is not always better for the industry. It would be convenient for me if Ferraris were free, but the people that make Ferraris probably have a different view.

When MTV (and radio) pushed content at us – we passively absorbed clips we didn’t specifically search out. They shoved stuff down our throats and a lot of the time we bought it, like a pre-blue pill Neo. Freedom’s just another word for “nothing left to lose.”

The IntraTubes have not shown much of an ability to convince people to go buy an LP/cassette/CD/MP3/brain-chip implant. This new “click it yourself” model is great at getting the videos out there, but – at least so far – not so good at turning those eyeballs into dollars. Those dollars turned into music video budgets for all the clips we loved (and the ones we sat through as well).

Labels: media, MTV, music video, TRL, viral video, YouTube

Pardon me for the possibility of dead horse beating ...

Last weekend's feature film box office receipts illustrate exactly why "viral video" is a terrible business model. Look at the photo atop this post. Have you seen it before? How many hundreds of times? Miss Lohan literally could NOT have been receiving more attention last week - just before the opening of her new film I Know Who Killed Me. Surely, this kind of coverage will get people into the theater, if even to watch a train wreck! But then -

Her movie opens in ninth place. The movie tanked. No one went to see "I Know Who Killed Me", even though it starred one of the most famous (infamous) people alive. All that attention and almost no dollars. And that is my point. Attention and dollars are not the same thing.

This is the same lack of real world results that viral videos brought to OK-Go.

Viral videos can only help an artist if they turn the attention gathered by the free clip into something more real - like a career, concert bookings or paying off that pesky Verizon bill. Attention is great. The audience obviously have to know who you are before they even know they want to buy your concert ticket, t-shirt or music (notice what order those are in). Attention is a good starting point but ...

Only if the audience ends up wanting more. Viral videos are great at grabbing attention, but very poor at turning that attention into the kind of audience/artist relationship where the wallet ever comes out.

Yes, the Lohan movie was terrible (a 7% from Rotten Tomatoes) - but if the prospect of seeing Lindsay as a stripper won't bring people to theaters after this kind of coverage - what chance does some puny rock band have?

Maybe this is just TOO capitalistic and musicians should only aspire to fame and attention with no regard for the concerns of Mammon. If that is the case, then I give you the most famous rockstars in the world - - - prisoners from Cebu Province in the Philippines.

Labels: media, music video, viral video, YouTube

HBO’s new comedy show “Flight of the Conchords” has obviously brought a lot of comparisons to Tenacious D. It is easy to understand why – two guys play guitars and sing funny songs while seemingly waaay too into it and believing they are (or are soon to be) massive rock stars. Jack Black and Kyle Gass have dreams of arena rock while the Conchordians imagine (or joke about imagining) a world where fey strummers are the coolest dudes around. Perhaps a decent metaphor of differing mindsets in the US and New Zealand, but anyway …

“Conchords” is a reasonably funny show with a very unscripted “post-comedy” feel for most of the episodes. But then comes the main event – the joke music videos. The show is not a parody of musicals where people suddenly break into song in the middle of their lives. There is plenty of that in the under-seen Top Secret where Val Kilmer cuts a rug and surfs with a 12-gauge.

What “Conchords” parodies so well is music videos. The two stars of the show don’t just break into song, they break into song with “edgy cool” camera moves and Caribbean-appropriate post effects. There is even a little Spike Jonze-ian Daft Punk action, all with charmingly low-fi budgets.

The parodies demonstrate just how welded into modern pop-culture MVs are. A few seconds into the music video sketches you can see what the Conchords guys are going for – even if they are not doing a specific famous video send-up (that is preserved for the genius of Indian Thriller). The Conchords perfectly capture the silliness of their (and our) favorite videos – turning the conventions of MTV into comedic punctuation for their slightly silly songs.

Music Videos are headed into a more and more fractured future where kids can delve deeper and deeper into their favorite sub-genres of music. The clips are sorted and arranged on the Inter-Tubes so that no music fan must be exposed to goth rock if he likes emo and saves the backpack rap fans from ever hearing or seeing R&B or drug-rap unless they choose to.

Conchords is obviously aimed at people old enough to recall MTV as a dominant and relatively omnivorous musical force and not just the pre-teen reality hoe-down it has become. As the conventions of music video are further and further Balkanized I wonder if only a few kids will be able to laugh at music video parodies because they won’t get the narrow-cast references. That and the parody videos will have the same production value as the “real” clips.

Labels: Flight of the Conchords, HBO, Indian Thriller, music video, selling, Spike Jonze, video link, viral video, YouTube

Make sure you read the previous posts on viral videos or you will be wondering why I am starting with the number four.

Once again, I am back to pontificate on why I think the whole “viral video” thing is such a non-factor in the world of music videos. There is some reasonable debate over what is and isn't a viral video. I would probably categorize a video as viral if it is getting passed around for it's visual impact, humor, shock value, and so on. "Hey, check out the new video from the band I like, Silversun Pickups" would not really be a viral thing in my book. Drop a comment if you disagree.

What I mean by “non-factor”
Before you go on about how wrong I am and how I should look at OkGo – please read the previous post. I like OkGo. They seem like fun. Their videos were cool and took lots of dedication – but so f*%&ing-what. The point of a music video is to get people to buy your record and those videos, despite massive hype in all kinds of mainstream media, did not do the job. As Xzibit would say – “Check the soundscan.”

But attention CAN lead to sales, right? Sure, but if the avalanche (based on indie music scale) of attention the treadmill dudes got won’t do it, nothing your band can come up with will. Big time advertisers go viral to help out wacky sports related comedy films and bite-sized cars – but for those products the, viral video is a tiny, tiny part of the marketing. For most musical artists, the music video (viral or not) might be the whole marketing campaign.

And attention, in and of itself, is not success (or money or career). Just “getting attention” is what the tap-dancing homeless guy does on the street corner or the self-destructive goth girl at your high school that blew everyone and then realized maybe she didn’t want that kind of attention. Music videos have to turn attention into a purchase – and viral videos do that about as well as the slutty girl turned a BJ into a relationship.

Reason #4 why I largely dismiss the power of viral videos:
Viral videos make the wrong kind of impression.
The thing that draws us to watch viral videos is that the images stand out. They are visual jokes or unexpected bursts of violence/sex that entertain us for a moment – then are gone. We like them, but we don’t love them. And breaking out the credit card takes love.

Some real famous YouToogle clips are the mentos experiment guys and the trampoline bear. Most everyone has seen these clips. Ask people on the street and they will nod in acknowledgement when you say “diet coke and mentos.” What people DON’T want is to know more about the breath-mint-ologists or hear what kind of songs the tranquilized bear might have recorded on Garage Band.

The connection viral video watchers have with a high-speed freeway chase or a father getting blasted in the nuts by his oblivious child is very different from the kind of connection music fans have with their favorite bands. In fact, I would say that the kind of viral attention drawn by water-skiing squirrel actually works against the viewer taking anything to do with that video seriously.

The term is “a mile wide, but an inch deep.” Interest in viral videos is just that – a mile wide and an inch deep. Everyone wants to watch the 20 second trampoline bear video clip, no one wants to buy the trampoline bear DVD.

Not only is the viral video impression a shallow one – I believe it makes the artist come across as cheap and disposable. If I can get this for free at any point in time by typing “okgo treadmill” into a web-browser, why should I pay real money for it? What makes this something to own rather than something that lives on the web I can call up whenever I feel like it?

In conclusion, viral video might make some kind of impression – but it is not the kind of attention you want. Unless you are still rocking the black lip-stick and hanging around under the bleachers after practice.

Labels: media, music video, selling, viral video, YouTube

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

The way music videos are seen by people (a topic endlessly discussed here) today doesn’t just change the way labels/prod cos/directors profit from them – it changes what music videos do.

Obviously, music video discussion sites like this one, SRO or antville are not for the casual fan. If you are interested in what other commenters think of the long-awaited Grizzly video, whether a thirty year old film is a music video, or what technique was used on some motion control shot, you are not a normal music video consumer. And videos on the web are perfect for you.

The Intratubes are great if you want to find a particular video from the past or, a new clip that hasn’t really hit TV yet (onsmash is great for urban new-ness), or a video that will never, ever get on television. But the web is NOT good for introducing viewers to new artists. Web videos don’t reach new record buyers, but Disney Channel does.

If you are YouToogling “LCD Soundsystem” you have already purchased or downloaded all the music of theirs you care to have. If you sought out a particular file out of the billions on the world wide web, you are already a fan and watching the video on-line has no chance of turning into more sales for the musicians involved (which was the original goal of MVs, by the way).

The reason radio did (does?) rule is because it reaches new ears. MTV (back in the good ole days) did the same – sending out music that the audience may not have heard in the hopes of creating new fans. On radio/music television people can stumble across something they haven’t heard before and that is how an industry expands.

If anyone is watching a video on the band’s site, they are not exactly new fans. And that seems to be the way 85% of videos are viewed these days – dialed up by the folks that already know about the music and the artist. Like a politician making a dynamic speech in his home district, the impression might be strong but it means nothing – since the audience is already on board.

Some videos have gotten a lot of heat in the video dork community of which I am a member. The whole Death Cab for Cutie makes a bazillion $353.28 videos thing was a big story on antville and the like but very few people bought that album. The fact that all us insiders heard about the videos or watched them all a dozen times and commented on which one was best means about nothing to record labels that are busy trying to not go under or decide what the budget for the next video should be.

Music videos have become more and more like the VW keychain that Volkswagen dealers mail out to people who have just bought a new Jetta. The keychain is cool, but it is rewarding existing fans – not building new ones. No matter how cool that keychain is, it can’t convince your neighbor, or the guy across town who has never seen it, that he too, should look into buying a VW.

I love music videos and I think that they can connect audiences with artists in ways that almost nothing else can. I just wish it didn’t feel so much we are preaching to the choir.

Labels: antville, insider, label, music video, selling, viral video, YouTube