I can imagine that seeing someone have huge success with a viral video using your music must be both pleasant and annoying.
Pleasant in that the popularity of the video gets your music out to people who might never have heard it before. O-Zone’s Dragostea Din Tei comes to mind — a lot fewer people ever heard of it before the Numa Numa guy came up with his Youtube video. (As an aside, I really find him annoying.)
Annoying in that it has to bite just a bit that someone else has more success with your music than perhaps you did.
If you’re smart (or lucky), you manage to create the most viral video yourself, like OK Go and their treadmill video for “Here it Goes Again“.
As a regular punter, I’m happy for viral videos because, without them I would never have heard some of my favourite songs.
I was looking at my Youtube updates today and decided to look at the featured videos on the Youtube home page. One of the videos today was Corey VIdal‘s video of him lipsynching in four-part harmony to comedy a cappella group Moosebutter‘s Star Wars song, a tribute to John Williams’ soundtrack work:
He does a pretty credible job of it. What’s funniest — and why the video works so well — is that his appearance fits many of the voices, and his lipsynching is really good. So it really looks like it’s all him.
Moosebutter’s page for the song includes the lyrics, radio-quality streaming audio of the song, and the option to purchase a copy of the song. You can also browse their other songs. I was going to buy a copy of this song but, you know, I like this enough that I think I’m going to just go for the whole enchilada and buy all of their stuff. The MP3s are DRM-free, which is a bonus. (Shh, don’t tell anyone that I’m actually paying for music. ;-))
(As an aside, how bizarre is it that anyone, let alone a 21-year-old from Ontario, can manage to ‘do Youtube “for a living”‘. I realize that a lot of work can go into making videos to post on Youtube but the idea that you can make a living doing it is just surreal.)
Life Begins at 41...or maybe 43 