Deadlines/Brief

Music videos are so 80s/90s, right? They belong with the era when MTV screened wall-to-wall vids instead of 'reality' TV? Try telling that to the millions who bought Gangnam Style; were they really simply loving the music? 1.6bn (and still climbing) have viewed the video on YT, not to mention the many re-makes (school eg, eg2), viral ads + celeb link-ups (even political protest in Seoul) - and it doesn't matter how legit it is, this nightmare for daydream Beliebers is making a lot of money, even from the parodies + dislikes. All this for a simple dance track that wouldn't have sounded out of place in 1990 ... but had a fun vid. This meme itself was soon displaced by the Harlem Shake. Music vids even cause diseases it seems!
This blog explores every aspect of this most postmodern of media formats, including other print-based promo tools used by the industry, its fast-changing nature, + how fans/audiences create/interact. Posts are primarily written with Media students/educators in mind. Please acknowledge the blog author if using any resources from this blog - Mr Dave Burrowes

Friday 8 May 2015

INDUSTRY Spotify moving into video?

One of the basic issues you have to address if you're making music videos is the perception that they're so, like, 90s, they're just over aren't they?

Ignoring my painful effort at teen skatz, in the era of UGC, where anyone can have a go at a music video with a phone or tablet, never mind a Mac, does the vid retain real cultural cachet? [zeitgeisty?] Is it still the centrepiece of marketing campaigns?

There's no definite answer ..  but I'd offer yes and no. The phenomenon of Gangnam Style is a YouTube video phenomenon; the cheesiness of the video, not the song, made it huge, and its monetisation was primarily through the billion+ YouTube hits and all those cover videos. No, because for all the hype Wrecking Ball's nude antics got Mikey Cyrus, its just part of a marketing mix that includes snogging Madonna and anything else that makes her Daily Mail clickbait. At that end of the market, as Elberse's case studies of Lady Gaga and Jay Z (yay, clickbait ahoy!) shows, tie-ins and distribution (often linked) are key, but so is audience engagement, some degree of interactivity with a campaign.

The humble QR code would have had Dennis McQuail, or Blumler and Katz, originators of the uses and gratifications theory, nodding to themselves, thinking just how right they were!

Where I've used the INDUSTRY heading, I'm often reflecting, quite indirectly at times, on the position of video in the marketing mix, and this post, marking the news that Spotify is set to (I'll try to update once news is out) move into video in a big way, is no exception.

By the way, given the apparent shocking outcome of the UK general election (voting count continues today), bear in mind the noise the Tories made about censoring and age rating music video, could develop into rather a major story for the music industry and even prosumers such as yourselves...

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