WEBSITE ALBUM SAMPLER Suede's non-music vid video!

An example which highlights three points:

1. Websites are routinely updated to centre on the latest album release
2. Bjork, The Pixies and many more are trailblazing a growing trend of creating videos for ALL album songs, not just the singles, recognising this boosts revenue-gaining YouTube hits ... but the importance of additional videos (unwrapping, lyric, live, UGC etc) is growing faster still, and Suede's "album sampler" is a good example. It would have Vernallis jumping up and down screaming I TOLD YOU SO given its narrative-free (is that possible?!) nature
3. Its another reminder of the convergence between film and music video - bear in mind that the 1964 Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night [Wiki] is widely considered as having created the music video template (archetype) with its video-like scenes ... and MJ's Thriller! While you will generally be creating youth-targeting productions with bands' existing (older) audience now the secondary target for you, Suede are possibly reinforcing their mature adult appeal with an entire feature-length arthouse movie released with their album. Its nature might also suggest an oddly upmarket (ABC1) audience for an Indie band. Read more here.

Here it is so you can judge for yourself - you should be thinking of this as an easy, but creatively free, extra (like the single shot video, lyric video...), so long as you remember to keep it MUCH shorter (or it'll just get blocked).

The website splash/landing/home page on 10.10.17:

The "album sampler"

...

RETROMANIA New life on Mars for 1973 Bowie promo

Student videos often tap into the possibility of promo campaigns targeting a new, younger audience. Some of the re-formed Pixies videos, such as Bagboy, are a good example of this approach in practice by established artists.

Bowie is not the first to get either a new video (there have been several posthumous videos for Elvis, Biggie, Tupac and more, not to mention the hologram live appearances by Ronnie Dio, Michael Jackson and more) or a re-edit, but the news that a 1973 promo clip is being revisited by its director and editor could inspire more such work.

This could offer buying incentives to repackaged best of albums, and at minimum is a cheap means of gaining free media publicity through media coverage. Video plays are monetised, even if the payment levels are controversially low per online view, and video collections remain a useful means of monetising through DVD sales (eg, I've pre-ordered a new Depeche Mode DVD collecting their video work, a November release that should sell well in the gap between album releases and tours).

Watch the reworked video for David Bowie's Life on Mars.

Music vid renaissance...for the biggest acts

The big budget music video died with Michael Jackson's reign as king of pop, as the music industry faced up to the disruptive impact of digitization.
Consumer/fan-made videos are widely used by the industry, and lo-fi official videos are not uncommon.
True.
BUT, in some cases this established narrative is being undermined.


Snippet:
Film-maker Romain Gavras’s cinematic vision for Jamie xx’s Gosh – which features a cast of 400 people and eschewed CGI and 3D effects – came with one instruction for its viewers: fully immerse yourselves in the apocalyptic experience. “Please watch full-screen with loud speakers or headphones,” Gavras tweeted on its release this month. The video was a moment, rolled out for a track that was originally released more than a year ago. It’s a track that really doesn’t need a music video, let alone a physical copy, designed to look like a knock-off DVD, of a 40-second trailer for said video, which was delivered to journalists days before its official premiere.
At a time when the music world is still dealing with illegal downloads and streaming culture, such an ostentatious approach to promoting an old song may appear incongruous. But thanks to the power of a small number of elite artists, music videos are having a renaissance and once more becoming events in themselves, the way they were when Michael Jackson released Thriller or Madonna put out Erotica. Some are cinematic: Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade, which is set to sweep the board at this year’s MTV Video Music awards; Rihanna’s Sledgehammer, the first video shot using solely Imax cameras. Others, such as David Bowie and Radiohead, have engaged with a new demographic using short, shareable Instagram vignettes.
Major artists and their labels are again spending serious money on music videos. However, unlike a few years ago, when the likes of Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus were going for the shock factor, artists are taking artistic, inventive approaches. When they do try to provoke outrage – as with Kanye West’s Famous or Rihanna’s Bitch Better Have My Money – it’s a step beyond Blurred Lines or Wrecking Ball.
How the pop video got weird again.

POSTMODERN, SIMULACRA Weird Al Yankovich parody v pastiche

[UPDATE FEB 2017 -scroll down for Weird Al discussion] This is a topic I've frequently touched upon, so you should also look at this post on Weezer...
 
As its such a useful example, I've referenced it in further posts on this topic (and others): use the tag!







The excellent, very readable, history of the music video by Austerlitz discusses this video - it really is worth having a flick through the index ... or just reading the book from scratch! [tag; specific post on the book]

Then there's a Robert Palmer example of intertextuality, a tag applied even more frequently than (queer theorist; gender as performativity) Judith Butler I see...

Is THIS depiction of Elvis (the magnificent Tortelvis!) any less 'real' than the videos/film clips that define him in the popular imagination - an image Elvis and his manager fought to control, but for many people boils down to a fat guy in a comedy white jumpsuit? Is the Weird Al version of 'Wacko Jacko' (below) any less real than the MJ we think we know from media coverage? The creators of the Weezer video did so having been bombarded with signifiers of the decade, such as the sitcom they parodied ... their representation (or simulacrum) is itself now a powerful signifier that will influence many more impressions of 'the 50s'.

If I asked you now to think about 'the 60s', chances are you'd think of hippies, flower power, the Stones ... many of the iconic 60s festivals were actually in the 70s, ditto many of the Stones classics thought of as 60s, while the metropolitan (major city) drug phenomenon took until the 1970s to spread further into towns and cities across Western countries, beyond London, San Fransisco etc. The 60s ended around 1974?! Maybe 1973?!
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A pastiche is a work of visual art, literature, theatre, or music that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists.^[1] Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates, rather than mocks, the work it imitates.^[2] [Wiki]

UK acts dominate 2012 US charts

Adele tops the US album sales for a 2nd year running, a feat last achieved by Thriller, while 4 of the top 5 albums were by UK acts. See article below for more details.

Adele joins exclusive club as 21 named bestselling album in the US … again!

Tottenham's finest becomes first recording artist since Michael Jackson to top US album sales charts in consecutive years

Sean Michaels, 4.1.13, http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/jan/04/adele-21-bestselling-album-us-again

Double top … Adele has emulated Michael Jackson after 21 became the first album since Thriller to top the sales charts two years in a row. Photograph: Matt Sayles/AP

For the second year in a row, Adele's 21 was the bestselling album in the US. The English singer has become the first artist since Michael Jackson to produce a record topping the sales charts in both the year of release and the year following.
According to Nielsen SoundScan, 21 sold 4.41m copies in 2012 – just 25% less than the year before, when XL/Columbia moved 5.82m. In fact, 21 hasn't left the weekly top 40 since it debuted, at No1, in March 2011. Adele's success puts the album in a very exclusive club: only three other LPs have scaled comparable heights across two successive years. The feat was last accomplished in 1985, when Jackson issued a little record called Thriller. The previous record holders were soundtracks: West Side Story in 1962/63, and My Fair Lady in 1957/58.
Overall, America's 2012 charts show a major British invasion. Apart from Taylor Swift's Red, which sold 3.11m, all of the top five albums were made by UK acts. One Direction's debut, Up All Night, was the No3 record, selling 1.62m, and their second album, Take Me Home, came in at No5. Mumford & Sons sold 1.46m copies of Babel, making it No4.
On the singles side, Gotye struck gold with his xylophone ditty Somebody That I Used to Know, selling 6.8m copies, almost exclusively digitally. Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe rung in at No2, followed by We Are Young, by Fun. All three songs broke the all-time digital record, previously set by Adele's Rolling in the Deep.
As in the UK, there was a dip in overall album sales, from 331m in 2001 to 316m in 2012. But vinyl sales continue to grow year after year, and are up 18% thanks to hits like Jack White's Blunderbuss and the Beatles' reissued Abbey Road. Still, those black lacquer discs form only a tiny part of the pie: less than 2% of all albums sold.
Britain's bestselling album of 2012, Emeli Sandé's Our Version of Events, has never charted in the US.

Any predictions for 2013?

Short filmic vid-ChrisCunningham-censorship

Can't really embed the vid I'll touch on here given its 147 uses of the f-word and more, but with this in mind you can watch it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlrbNqs61nU
Directed by Chris Cunningham (rem, a comp. DVD of his vids is available for loan) for the Warp dance act Aphex Twin, the video for Windowlicker is an edgy satire of contemporary US urban, hip-hop cultural tropes and cliches; the far end of the spectrum from Michael Jackson's comparatively effete streetscapes in Bad or Billie Jean.

Clocking in at 10:34, this goes beyond the typical brief diegetic intro we get in many vids - again, a useful comparison would be Jackson (the John Landis-directed Thriller).

Aphex Twin play with gender identity

There's a nice, and not too complicated (the sort of thing you have the facilities as Media students to replicate), effect to create a 38-window streeeetch limo (look for the telltale repeat of light moving across the two women to see the join). The vid also sees gender identity played with (a nod to Judith Butler's 'performativity of gender' theory?), something the band have done in live performances/artshows.
Unsurprisingly, the vid was the subject of censorship - with an equally common response in that 'clean' versions were created, though MTV did receive a fine for airing an uncut version before 9pm.
I've copied in below the informative blurb from the YouTube uploader below, but put this behind a 'read more' rather than remove the swear words contained in this. But first...

Consider this: is there an issue with censoring satire of sweary, misogynistic cultural forms and behaviour, which surely requires the use of swearing and images of misogyny to function with some level of verisimilitude?

There's another useful web feature on this, and Cunninghmam's work: http://www.director-file.com/cunningham/aphex2.html

Now the YouTube text:

Kanye West: 35min vid

The idea of an extended music vid, effectively as a short film isn't new - John Landis' work for Michael Jackson's Thriller itself built on The Beatles' films, which could be viewed as a series of sketched built around multiple prototype music vids. Kanye West's effort, the 35min Runaway, has split web opinion, currently accruing 29,055 likes/5,101 dislikes after 5,389,189 views at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7W0DMAx8FY and another 28,165 likes/2,890 dislikes from 6,331,377 viewings at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg5wkZ-dJXA&feature=channel (just some of the uploads on YouTube alone; its also on his official site and many more).
The bottom line - its working wonders as a promotional tool. KanyeWest.com even includes a live twitter feed on what people are saying about it, stark evidence of its impact.