Can you imagine how great working on the marketing team for Guns’n'Roses must be? Presumably they’ve spent the last 15 years having long lunches, playing office cricket, and developing RSI from playing too many web games. Now, though, they’re getting back to work for the long-awaited Chinese Democracy album.
How? With a nifty YouTube contest, inviting fans to perform their most ridiculous air guitar antics to the new album’s title track and upload the footage to the official G’n'R YouTube channel. The winner gets a listening party for them and 100 mates in their town, as well as a platinum disc.
Entries close on 17th November. The promo video announcing the contest above has some pretty good examples.
It’s a good day for Democrat-leaning online music, what with Everclear’s ‘Jesus Was A Democrat’ giveaway, and now news that there are more than 800 songs about Barack Obama on YouTube. That’s right, 800. They’ve even been catalogued in their own channel.
How many of them are any good is another question, of course, but Obama’s YouTube popularity has been boosted by vids like Will.I.Am’s ‘Yes We Can’, and of course the infamous ‘I Got A Crush On Obama’ viral (watch that one above).
John McCain can’t compete, although a healthy stash of Sarah Palin songs have already been uploaded to YouTube, representing her popularity (well, or lack of it) among US voters.
As part of a wide-ranging interview with Billboard, UMG chairman/CEO Doug Morris has been talking about the label’s possible divorce from YouTube at the end of this year. It’s been rumoured that UMG will set up its own D2C video site instead, to get higher CPM revenues.
“With YouTube, the quality isn’t great; it gets low [cost per thousand],” he says. “On the other hand, more professional [services] get a higher CPM. So the idea of us getting tied into a lower CPM isn’t a smart thing.” Online video revenues are apparently “far more” than $20 million for UMG already.
Morris also talks about UMG’s equity investments in music web startups, and the PR fallout from the RIAA’s file-sharing lawsuits. On the former: “No one’s going to build a build a business off our backs if I can help it without us being part of it. It’s just not fair… If these companies are successful, we’ll do well. It’s better than having a company like MTV, where we gave them our music for very little money and they built a $30 billion company or whatever it was for nothing.”
The question of how labels and artists actually make money from YouTube has been a live issue in recent times, but Google’s video-sharing site has just introduced another option.
It’s inserting click-to-buy links below selected videos, with music one of the first categories to get the treatment. So, if you watch the official video for Katy Perry’s `I Kissed A Girl’, there are buttons to buy the song from iTunes or Amazon.
YouTube is also providing Amazon links for games like Electronic Arts’ `Spore’. Google says “this is just the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube”. The initiative will apparently also work for user-generated videos - for example, bedroom cover versions of ‘I Kissed A Girl’ - but only if the rightsholder has ‘claimed’ them.
It’s well-known that many of the most popular videos on YouTube are music videos - with the trend moving away from bedroom hairbrush-wailers towards official videos from signed artists.
ReadWriteWeb has been analysing the Top 10 All-Time Most Popular videos on YouTube, and says that six of them are music videos. Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend takes top spot with more than 103 million views, but is joined in the chart by Leona Lewis’ Bleeding Love, Rihanna’s Don’t Stop The Music, Chris Brown’s With You, Timbaland’s Apologize, and Alicia Keys’ No One.
Of course, the dominance of the chart by music videos will only fuel the debate over how these vids should be monetized, and what share of advertising revenue is justified. Equally interesting, though, is that many of these popular music videos have had the ‘embedding’ feature disabled, meaning they can’t be posted onto blogs and other websites.
The most entertaining music piracy story this week concerns the leaking of four new U2 tracks online. Why? Because the source of the leak was allegedly Bono himself. Not in the way you think, though. Apparently the frontman was playing the music loud in his South France villa, and a passerby recorded them and uploaded (more…)
If YouTube has been slow to respond so far to the technical gremlins in its audio compression (see story earlier), it might be because it’s got legal issues on its mind. Specifically, another heavyweight media firm is suing YouTube for alleged copyright infringement. This time it’s Italian broadcaster Mediaset, which is owned (more…)
If your iTunes library is a mess, TuneUp wants to help. It’s a plug-in for the iTunes application that analyses your library and cleans up the tags and cover art, via a partnership with Gracenote. Recommendation features are also built in, along with links to YouTube videos and eBay auctions based on your playlists. (more…)
It’s a really simple site, too. You simply type in a Last.fm username, and get served up with a customised channel of YouTube videos based on that user’s tastes. “This started as just an experiment, and it will probably stay that way,” says creator Tim Bormans. Enjoy.
YouTube will usher in a batch of new advertising features this year, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told NBC. Asked how the company plans to begin generating cash from its popular online video service, he said: “We believe the best products are coming out this year. And they’re new products. They’re not announced. (more…)
