The title, and reporting, comes from an interesting piece written on one of my favorite blogs, NewTeeVee, about the power of user-created music videos to push album sales and promote songs. Over the past couple of years there have been a few notable cases where amateur video producers ended up creating the ‘official’ video for a big artist simply because fans voted with their eyeballs on YouTube–how long until major record-label artists start farming their video content out to fans and let the wisdom of the crowds dictate the ‘official’ video? Also interesting to note how much money YouTube/major labels earn from these hit videos but how little the actual video producer makes.
“The first video ever shown on MTV was for the The Buggles’ song Video Killed the Radio Star. Given how successful amateur videos have been lately at boosting record sales, an appropriate song for the modern age might be Viral Videos Killed the Music Video Star. Of course if there were such a song, a video of it would be found on YouTube, and it would probably be made by someone who had nothing to do with the song other than liking it.
Historically, music videos were promotional vehicles that ran on outlets like MTV. Big budgets were spent on lavish productions that would ideally captivate watchers, prodding them into buying the accompanying single/album. But while music videos have proven enormously popular on YouTube, earlier this year the video-sharing giant got embroiled in skirmishes with the record labels and rights holders over costs. The end result of that bickering is Vevo, a forthcoming satellite site founded by YouTube and Universal Music that will showcase — and monetize — music video traffic.
But what if plain ole users prove more adept than the pros?”
Read the rest of the article here: Will Viral Video Kill the Music Video?.
