
Wholehearted applause this morning is going in the direction of Moones, a British band whose willingness to get drunk on camera in the name of digital promotion is laudable. The band launched a video last week of their song ‘Better Energy’ with the suffix ‘Drunk in Session’. And that’s exactly what the interactive video portrays, using annotations for fans to decide whether the band have drunk No Beers, 20 Beers, 40 Beers, 60 Beers or 80 Beers, switching between these settings at any point. A one-camera in-studio shoot means it’ll have been fairly cheap to film (plus the cost of the beer, obviously) with the annotations a simple but clever use of YouTube interactivity. More importantly from the band’s perspective, it’s given their profile a big (albeit temporarily viral) bump: their original video for ‘Better Energy has been watched 73k times since being launched a year ago, yet the drunk version is already nudging 700k a week after going live. The question now – as with other stunts of this type – is whether Moone’s actual music keeps people interested in the longer term.