How YouTube fan vids make artists money: Harlem Shake eg

IN BRIEF:

The stats in this article seemed modest by March

The bottom line? The dominant narrative around digitisation and the music industry is of piracy and the disruption to the traditional record industry model centred on purchases of physical media. How fair the payment splits are can be debated, but music video's viral potential does offer a chance to make money - even if its fans (re)making their own versions of an original video. Their work can deliver significant cash to the artists behind the original.

Its a simple but fundamental point if you want to understand how the music business works today: while debates may rage around streaming services such as Spotify and just how much/little remuneration they provide to artists, there is serious money to be made from distribution through YouTube - and that includes fan-made vids/UGC (user-generated content). The lexicon of YT would label many of these 'responses'.

Scroll to the bottom for info on the new YouTube-based record label, All Def Music, a collaboration between Russell Simmons, Universal Music Group and others. 

This blog's description makes reference to the ongoing status of music video, and particularly to the scope of viral hits to raise serious revenues. Here's a little detail on how a much-mimicked video, in a very postmodern fashion (one that would gain a knowing smile from Andy Warhol, whose 'Factory' churned out 'his' work actually produced by others!), makes money directly from the multiple 'tributes', 'responses', remakes, term them what you will:

Those who enroll in the content ID service give YouTube a reference file of their content. They then choose between getting videos that are found to use that content blocked from the site, or taking a slice of the advertising revenue those rip-off videos generate and tracking the original's success.

Will Internet kill creativity?

[NB: this post contains strong language quoted from a Thom Yorke interview]

IN BRIEF:
A series of high profile artists have expressed strong views on the business model of streaming sites such as Spotify: some (Thom Yorke, David Byrne) argue its grossly unfair to artists, who receive very, very little even for huge international hits; others (Dave Stewart, Dave Allen) argue they offer promotion and that we should accept this is what the market and today's consumers, who prefer 'renting' to purchasing, want, and that the music business as it currently is is no more 'worthy' than others like the travel industry which have been 'disrupted' and transformed by new media.

There have been a spate of major names in the music biz recently speaking out about what they perceive as the inequities of the record industry, specifically the new streaming services (particularly Spotify), arguing that their revenue isn't reaching artists. Here's an excerpt from a lengthy diatribe/considered attack (which do you think?) from Talking Heads' David Byrne, an artist well known for experimenting with digital technologies:

Many article comments disagreed with Byrne

The amounts these services pay per stream is miniscule – their idea being that if enough people use the service those tiny grains of sand will pile up. Domination and ubiquity are therefore to be encouraged. We should readjust our values because in the web-based world we are told that monopoly is good for us. The major record labels usually siphon off most of this income, and then they dribble about 15-20% of what's left down to their artists. Indie labels are often a lot fairer – sometimes sharing the income 50/50. Damon Krukowski (Galaxie 500, Damon & Naomi) has published abysmal data on payouts from Pandora and Spotify for his song "Tugboat" and Lowery even wrote a piece entitled "My Song Got Played on Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89, Less Than What I Make from a Single T-shirt Sale!" For a band of four people that makes a 15% royalty from Spotify streams, it would take 236,549,020 streams for each person to earn a minimum wage of $15,080 (£9,435) a year. For perspective, Daft Punk's song of the summer, "Get Lucky", reached 104,760,000 Spotify streams by the end of August: the two Daft Punk guys stand to make somewhere around $13,000 each. Not bad, but remember this is just one song from a lengthy recording that took a lot of time and money to develop. That won't pay their bills if it's their principal source of income. And what happens to the bands who don't have massive international summer hits?

Using INSTAGRAM to promote promos! (Britney, Rhianna etc)

Blogging, FB and Twitter are social/new media frequently mentioned here as tools used by artists/labels to boost acts'/videos profile and distribution.
Another useful site, heavily used by many artists, from the smallest Indie acts to global names, is Instagram...

On August 9, 2012, English musician Ellie Goulding came out with a new music video for her song "Anything Could Happen". The video only contained fan submitted Instagram photographs that used various Instagram filters to represent words or lyrics from the song^[63] and over 1200 different photographs were submitted. [Wiki]

Its a Britney World: The Britney Meme

I put this collection together some time ago, as part of the preparation for Music Video Day, when we remade an inconic video in just one day. Its a good example of a meme - but also of the difficulty of pinning down a singular text in our postmodern hypertextual age.

This track has become a cultural meme...

I've gathered some examples of the many treatments of this track below. Yours will shortly become the latest addition to this postmodern phenomenon!

If you come across any others please pass on details (with a link) as a comment!

Eric Fellner pre-WT: sleazy pop vids?

Co-founder Sarah Radclyffe left WT in 1992 when they effectively became a Polygram subsidiary (albeit with operational independence), and Eric Fellner stepped in to join the other co-founder Tim Bevan, an immensely successful partnership that continues to tower over British cinema 2 decades on.
Here's the incomparable Indie auteur Alex Cox* on Fellner, who he crossed paths with around the time (1985) Bevans and WT were releasing My Beautiful Laundrette, the company's 1st feature. Cox was in pre-production for Love Kills, later renamed Sid and Nancy, a typically warped, slightly surreal biopic of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen ...

CREATIVITY: Alex Cox on Groupwork dynamics

The following is extracted from the brilliant Indie auteur Alex Cox's X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker (Soft Skull Press: Brooklyn, 2008). Writing about production of his debut feature, Repo Man (an archetypal cult movie - not to be confused with the Jude Law vehicle Repo Men), he recalls being challenged over portraying a key female character as a serial adultress. He thought his script was spot on, but then again ...

...I am a white male leftist, already guiltyu of the sins of sexism, racism, and generally wishy-washy-ism. As the days went by, I reflected regretfully on the adolescent sexism of my script. ... I [removed a] sex scene. Still I felt guilty: Debbie was still a poor excuse for a character ... I rewrote the liquor-store scene [giving her a heroic send-off].
This was a good idea. ... By alerting the director, the TV coordinator and casting director improved the picture. Could a film made by a group - where all take the role of a director, say - reach a decision like this? Presumably it could. Who knows? Maybe this interaction points to a more collaborative system, in which a group might make decisions more quickly.
(emphasis added; p. 59)

Have you reflected on the role collaboration played in your creativity? Remember, seeking out (at minimum) audience feedback implies that the audience/producer divide is questionable too! (cf. Gillmor's "the former audience" concept (2004))

If you're willing to try out something a little different, you might just enjoy Repo Man...

Prankvertising

A neologism for you all: PRANKVERTISING:

With brands finding it increasingly difficult to advertise effectively via traditional channels, publicity-whoring techniques such as prankvertising are gaining traction. Earlier this year, Thinkmodo, the ad agency behind the 'sNice stunt, promoted the crime thriller Dead Man Down by staging a (fake) murder in an elevator and filming people's reactions as the doors opened.
[Arwa Mahdawi, Prankvertising – a marketing heart-attacktic too far?, Guardian, 9.10.13, accessed online 15.10.13]

This group used a viral approach - see bot. left

Why blog on this under the guise of music video? Because advertising agencies, and music acts, were trailblazers in the use of viral-style videos, a trend now so mainstream that the X Factor ad break has been the source of one of the more successful virals, the rural rap selling dairy products.
Prankvertising - which raises serious ethical (and legal/health and safety) issues you'd need to address if considering this specific form - is just one form this has taken.
The main point for you here is that a spin-off, complementary or secondary, video project would be of benefit. Can you come up with an idea which fans could replicate and submit their own versions of, for use in a follow-up vid, a remake, a website-only version etc? Gillmor (2004), one of many influential web 2.0 theorists, has announced the "end of audience", denoting the smashing of the former divide between audience and producer.

Politics in Music Video

A simple post, for now at least: a few examples of music videos which have incorporated strong, explicit political themes (depending on how you read a video, any video can be seen as having implied political themes, and certainly ideological messages), following on from a student pitch centred on Muse's Assassin, a politically-charged track.

War is overdue
The time has come for you
To shoot your leaders down
Join forces underground
[sample lyric from Muse's Assassin]

First up, a band with a long history of tracks and videos taking up explicit, and generally controversial, counter-hegemonic, themes and positions: Megadeth. They were one of the very, very few bands to venture to my home town back in Northern Ireland in the midst of 'The Troubles' (an absurdly reductive label if ever there was one. Frontman Dave Mustaine naively took the advice of a friendly face just before going onstage, and, in a fairly Loyalist (pro-UK) town, pronounced his support for Irish Republicanism ... causing a fierce riot.
NB: The video below contains hyper-fast editing, coming close to a flashing light effect. (View in higher quality 720p here)


There are many metal bands that incorporate rebellious, counter-hegemonic messages, with the popular campaign to get Rage Against the Machine's totemic Killing in the Name Of [a performance video only; includes strong language] an example of how audiences' response to, or uses of, such material doesn't necessarily reflect the full political message as intended.

Next, a Brazilian thrash band well known for their explicitly political lyrics, Sepultura; songs such as Polozia are straightforward in their condemnation of excessive state force. They've used news footage of riots and civil uprisings in their videos (including, from memory, either Inner Self or Beneath the Remains), such as here, with Refuse/Resist - not just employing a political theme but actually a call to arms and action:


There are many more examples out there; punk lyrics were often highly political and so to many of the proto-videos produced around that time - Green Day's American Idiot is a good contemporary example of this.


Maggie Thatcher inspired many (mostly) hostile tracks over the years, continuing when she died in 2013 and any attempted debate over the rights/wrongs of her receiving a state funeral was swiftly shot down by most of the mainstream media. The Huffington Post also did an interesting post on this.

Any more suggestions? Add below as a comment, and I'll add to the post.

Vinyl sales record goes to...

Perfect illustration of how the 'new media' age is not simply a narrative about digitised media formats: news that Daft Punk have become the biggest seller of vinyl in Amazon's history (they launched in 1995). It's become increasingly common for bands (especially rock/Indie, but also pop) to issue limited editions of vinyl alongside CD and download, something that anyone considering a promo package should consider...

Daft Punk, fresh from breaking all sorts of records with their Get Lucky single, seem to be almost single-handedly reviving the vinyl music industry. Amazon has announced that the French duo's album Random Access Memories has become their best-selling vinyl LP of all time.
In fact, the DJs' latest LP isn't just the best-selling vinyl record of summer 2013: nobody has sold more vinyl copies since Amazon launched in 1995. Daft Punk top Amazon.co.uk's all-time vinyl bestseller list, followed by Adele, for 21, Amy Winehouse, for Back to Black, and David Bowie, who has two records in the all-time top 10. 

Lists of Best/Worst Videos Ever Made

Lady Gaga features in both worst + best lists...

If seeking inspiration, why not learn from the best, or apply the lessons from the worst?
Here's a few lists, mainly subjective of course, and reflecting the audience of the site/publication, which may help you identify some useful vids to investigate further - or simply to browse and to come up with a list of what features make for a truly popular/great/awful music video.
If you look closely, you'll find certain directors appear repeatedly: Spike Jonze, Anton Corbijn, Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry prominent amongst these.
If you've any lists you can recommend (or have made your own), add a link as a comment.

Some Useful Sites

RadarMusic: acts/labels actively seek out video-makers

There are many links lists on this blog, so rather than add to these, here's a few useful sites I've noticed recently:
For UK chart archives, The Official Charts Company offers a dropdown list by year, which then displays weekly clickable charts;
Although its for the US Billboard and only the year's top 20, this site is superb, with videos and iTunes links for each beside each single.
Odd URL (songs-old.com), but you get a random vid loaded up if you click on the homepage (likewise the homepage for music-old.com!). If you refresh the page a fresh random selection is made.

Top 40 vids right here;

The MTV Videos page is ... awful!

Director's Cut/Anniversary as promo tool: Nirvana

Picked this up from the Mojo website: Nirvana are issuing the 'director's cut' of Heart Shaped Box, borrowing a standard tool from the film toolkit to promote back catalogue sales:

An extended version of the Anton Corbijn-directed video for Nirvana’s Heart-Shaped Box has appeared online ahead of the release of the 20th Anniversary edition of In Utero (due out on September 24).
We’ve called on MOJO’s forensic unit to compare this Director’s Cut with the original film. Their analysis suggests three key areas where this new version differs, namely, more appearances from the small girl in the robe, more of the fleshy-body-suit woman and more Nirvana at their visceral best. 

[source: http://www.mojo4music.com/5909/nirvana-heart-shaped-box-directors-cut/]

The magazine is running its own tie-in, using the 20th anniversary of its release as a hook too:

And if that’s not enough of a Nirvana rarity for you, you can always check out the band’s original 1988 recording contract with Sub Pop. As the label says, “Six hundred bucks well spent. Not that we had it at the time.”
And don’t forget – you can read Jon Savage’s mammoth 1993 interview with Kurt Cobain in the current issue of MOJO magazine – on sale now. 

[ibid.]

THE POINT IS...
Good example of another strategy used by record co's/bands to promote back catalogue, but also a good idea for you to consider making a vid for a track released 10/20/25 (etc) years ago, as there is likely to be increased media attention and possibly a re-release/re-packaging/compilation to go with it.
You can look for inspiration by viewing past charts (eg at http://www.officialcharts.com/archive/music/). Another great site, which features all the vids (with iTunes purchase links) for top 20s of each year in the 70s/80s/90s (US charts) is http://www.songs-old.com/Top-20-Songs-Billboard-Charts.html.

Here's the vid cited:

There's only two One Directions

Edited within an impressively tight timeframe, here are the two edits of the IGSMedia remake/pastiche of the 1D hit One Thing - the original video is embedded within an earlier post.

Enjoyed these? Why not try the Britney remake, and sample a wide range of other videos at the IGSMediaStudies YouTube channel!!!

Kanye West's interactive video

I'll get round to a round-up post on video-centred apps that I've posted on multiple times; this is a linked but distinct topic: Kanye West has made his new video interactive - you can change the vocal and click to grab screenshots for Instagram (etc).
Here's what you see when you visit KanyeWest.com (as I did on 23.7.13):

The splash screen for KanyeWest.com in July 2013

I was reminded about this just now thanks to a MusicGuardian article, a great source of relevant news, interviews and features, specifically a blog post by Harriet Gibsone. She makes a great point about Kanye's new vid, which is exclusively available via his site (a pointer towards YouTube's grip loosening?):

As this video is streamed exclusively from West's website, it renders the viewer unable to fast-forward or trace backwards: Black Skinhead demands your attention

What I also noticed is that there's no attempt at any age restriction, or warning, yet the track features swearwords and racial terms. YouTube hasn't a great reputation for effectively limiting content to minors, but it does at least run age warnings/restrictions and censor some material.
[tbc]

2013 Remake Challenge: 1D's One Thing

My ears look forward to this as much as a sharp stick being poked through them, but here we go with a 2013 vid remake challenge. Students pitched a multitude of interesting ideas, from Rebecca Black's advert for earplugs, Friday, to Olivia Newton-John's Grease, but a consensus was reached around this aural atrocity...

Not sure how the open-top bus will be managed (a matchbox toy? car-trailer? cardboard cutout?), and I've a sinking feeling I've figured out who 'Zayn' is and why there was an optimistic call for yours truly to play him, but we start with meticulous denotation of the original.
It helps to have UGC/fan-made vids like this:

It also helps that YouTube have signed deals with most of the major labels (and many Indies) to ensure such vids can be exhibited through their site!
We'll carry out meticulous denotation using note sheets like those pictured below.

VidEG: Pixies "Bagboy" (2013)

Much retweeted: notice of tour, vid + free MP3 download

ACT: The Pixies

TRACK: Bagboy

YEAR: 2013

DIRECTOR: LAMAR+NIK

GENRE: Alt rock

MAIN AUDIENCE: 25-44 (recent/original fans), but clearly targeting new 15-24 + possibly younger teens/tweens; M-oriented vid?

LYRICS

Money is recouped by gathering email addresses

I've blogged on The Pixies before: see this post detailing the band's style, including their quirky take on vids (or 'anti-vids'), or this post detailing their classic single-take vid Velouria (more egs here and here; comparisons to Jesus and Mary Chain here)

THE VIDEO IS EMBEDDED AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST

LAMAR+NIK often feature non-CGI sculpture-as-title. Reminds me of films like Napoleon Dynamite

IN BRIEF: TYPICALLY ODDBALL, FILMIC PIXIES VID...

• The use of digital media to promote this is exemplary
• its timed to help promote a tour: the MP3 is available free
• with controversial content rendering it unsuitable for pre-watershed UK screening, its main life will be online
• the media language is odd for a music vid, more cinematic in its approach, especially editing
• the central character is a clear representation of a (younger) fan, tho' there may be veiled criticism in there too
• its hard to judge whether this will succeed in appealing to a young, new Pixies fanbase
• there are some touches of creative genius...

SOME BACKGROUND: EXEMPLARY DIGITAL AGE RELEASE FROM DINOSAURS

Users are encouraged to tweet/FB post

This is a great example of an act originating decades ago (so long ago in fact that your blog author was barely out of primary school) that have firmly grasped the challenge and opportunity presented by digitisation and social media. I stumbled across news of a new release on Facebook ... forgot about it ... decided to log in to a Twitter account I've not looked at since setting it up years ago ... and quickly came across a link again.

News of a tour is all over the blogosphere, twittersphere, FB, e-zines and magazines (depending on what feeds you subscribe to of course). The comeback of this band is newsworthy for many publications/outlets, but the killer hook that's guaranteed the print/screen inches, thumbs up, likes, retweets and whatnots is a new video, plus the opportunity to download the track for free.
That last detail helps show the shift from music sales to ticket/merchandise sales for many acts in the digital age, plus revenue more from streaming (often by sharing in the website's, eg YouTube, advertising revenue) than physical sales.

 "You are proselytizing alone listening to the voice with your ears" (sample lyric)

Screenshot taken 4 days after this was uploaded. Note the FREE DOWNLOAD link, + director's site URL

THE VID: BASIC SUMMARY

FCProX FX: Stan Bush: Dare experiment

IGS Media Technician John has started editing a video for Stan Bush's Dare, popularised through its inclusion in a 1986 animated Transformers movie OST (though I have to confess being unfamiliar with either of these!). The highest google ranking for vids goes to a UGC/fan-made vid from 2008 featuring footage from the 80s and newer Transformers flicks.
Arguably, then, the target aud for a vid for this today would have crossover appeal to an older, 35-44, age range from its original release as well as a contemporary youth audience (though the AOR nature of the track, and some dated/80s elements of this, might well limit youth appeal). As an independent artist in his own right, John's own auteur stamp is evident, with the fantasy themes and abstract style that marks much of his work (in film and other media) suggesting a more niche appeal than the very mainstream original use of the track.
The early, initial guide cut (not much further than laying down a basic guide track + starting some FX experiments) is embedded below, followed by a summary feedback from a sample of 17 year-old Media students. I'll add further details of FCProX tools used, and further cuts as they become available.

Golden Oldies topping pop charts: Black Sabbath

These cool cats top today's charts!

43 years on, their new album exploded into the charts

2013 has seen Rod Stewart set a new record for gaps between number one albums: 37 years.
With the geriatric Rolling Stones seemingly the biggest live draw on the planet, its increasingly hard to argue with Simon Reynolds' proposition in Retromania that the old is dominating the new in a format (pop/rock music) that was once defined by its freshness and novelty.
Further evidence comes this week with the news that Black Sabbath have quickly broken Hot Rod's record, with an incredible 43 year gap between number one albums. Their new effort, 13, is the band's 1st no.1 since 1970's Paranoid. They're also a top draw at festivals this summer.
See this article, though its been a widely reported news story.

Septuagenarians with a firm handle on social media

As someone who went to see Heaven and Hell (Black Sabbath with Ronnie Dio on vocals) live not so long ago, I'm not entirely surprised by this. Then again, like many long-running acts, the Sabs were seen as a joke for a large chunk of the 80s/90s.
I wonder if Beliebers will be queuing up to pay hugely inflated ticket prices to see a silver-haired Justin belt out 'his' hits some decades into the future...

You can view the video for their lead single, God is Dead, here.
As the YT screenshot below demonstrates, the Sabs (or at least their record label), are fully up to speed with social media (lets not forget that singer Ozzy Osbourne was a reality TV pioneer, with The Osbournes success helping to underpin MTV's shift from video channel to reality TV dreck/awesomeness (delete as age appropriate!).

Picturing Ideas: Timo Maas + the vision thing

Can you picture a vid for Timo Maas' Pictures?

A solid idea is central to a successful video project, to get momentum going, to make it possible to have a meaningful sense of target audience and how your media language choices will pander to them, to simply hold together the whole project.
That doesn't mean it has to be complex, or take agonised weeks to formulate.
It also doesn't mean you can't radically shift your idea once you start practice shoots and testing the idea out, not to mention the scope of post-production (editing) to transform an idea into a new shape and direction.
I was thinking about this on the way into work this morning, listening to the following track, Pictures by Timo Maas ... have a go at listening + brainstorming ideas for yourself before you read the text below the embedded vid... (the lyrics can always help this process!)

(you can also listen on soundcloud)
Here's the notion that hit me ...

U+G: when fans turn on artists

Michelle Shocked has seen her fanbase all but disappear this week after apparently issuing stridently homophobic remarks onstage (she rejects the claims). The Guardian article below looks at other cases where this happens (they could also have mentioned Megadeth, whose vocalist Dave Mustaine has taken to issuing right-wing statements since becoming 'born again', but then they're not a very Guardian band!).
Useful to consider in the light of theories such as McQuail's uses and gratifications, and the whole idea of fans forming part of their identity through their musical allegiances.

Michelle Shocked her fans – but she wasn't the first musician to do so

Dixie Chicks, Morrissey, Donna Summer, Moe Tucker and Eric Clapton all faced a backlash when they surprised their audiences with unexpected views

Michelle Shocked: and she did. Photograph: Rex Features/Startraks Photo

Guitar-strumming Michelle Shocked used to be beloved by beardy folk fans and granary lefties. So it came as a curveball at a gig on Sunday night when she put down her acoustic guitar, pushed aside the mung beans and delivered an astonishingly anti-gay rant that claimed "same-sex marriage will be the downfall of civilisation". And which city did she choose to air these "robust" views? Only gay capital San Francisco.
Yet Shocked isn't the first musician to, well, shock her fans by revealing surprising views ...

Dixie Chicks

Dixie Chicks performing in 2003, when they were monstered by the US right for gently criticising George Bush. Photograph: Mb Charles/Retna UK The mild-mannered Texan country trio were monstered by the US rightwing and blacklisted by American radio after gently criticising George Bush in 2003. On tour in London shortly before the invasion of Iraq, lead vocalist Natalie Maines said: "Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We don't want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed the president is from Texas." Public protests saw their CDs bulldozed into the ground. The band later posed naked for the cover of Entertainment Weekly with slogans such as "Traitors",

VEVO vertically integrates with TV channels

VEVO, as a coalition of 2 of the 3 remaining global giants, Universal and Sony, already had a production arm; YouTube acted as the main distributor/exhibitor for its wares (music videos) until now, arguably being of greater importance than MTV and suchlike. Now they've launched their own channels, so are able to boast in-house production, distribution and exhibition.
There's more in the article below, including the assertions that "Part of what we're trying to achieve is that element of nostalgia but 70% of our audience is under 34."
YouTube has now bought a 10% stake in VEVO.

Article source.

Vevo launches 24-hour digital music channel in US and Canada

Video website hopes to recreate MTV's 1980s heyday with service for internet-connected TVs, tablets and mobiles

• Josh Halliday
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 March 2013

Rihanna: likely to feature on Vevo TV. Photograph: Stuart Wilson/Getty Images

Thirty-one years after MTV flickered into life to the sound of the Buggles hit Video Killed the Radio Star, the video website Vevo has launched a 24-hour digital music channel in the US and Canada.
Vevo, the site created by record giants Universal Music and Sony, hopes to recreate MTV's 1980s heyday with the channel, showing a selection of music videos, live concerts and original programming.

Sony CEO: social media more important than radio

Sony's CEO says in an interview for the CBI's magazine that One Direction have shown him that social ('new) media are now more important than the traditional ('old') media. Sony used UGC, such as fan campaigns to get One Direction to play a gig near them ("Bring 1D To Me"), to build up buzz and a following for One Direction before any material was released to radio stations, traditionally the key to breaking any band.

Gatfield says this has completely changed the dynamic of launching an act, enabling music companies to bypass the traditional radio-station gatekeepers.
“Traditionally you’d have to persuade radio to support it and there’d be a long, hard slog while you built up the support and marketed them on the back of airplay,” he says. “This is the other way round: you market them and then airplay is the accelerator.”

He goes so far as to say that Sony wouldn't now consider signing a band that didn't already have social media profiles up and running.

Article Source.

One Direction: Social media made them a global phenomenon, says Sony CEO

One Direction have become a $50m business thanks to their army of fans across the world - and this is just the start, according to Nick Gatfield

15th February 2013
This article appeared in the December edition of Business Voice, the CBI magazine

'Their live business is through the roof. I haven’t seen anything this big in my entire career on a global level.'
- Nick Gatfield

To understand the transformative effect of social media on how music labels market their acts, look no further than the success of One Direction.
The boy band, who are signed to the Syco label, came third in The X-Factor TV show in 2010. Since then they have won a Brit award recognising their worldwide success and become a $50m business – with Sony Music UK CEO and chairman Nick Gatfield predicting that this will double in 2013.

Nick Gatfield: X-Factor made us complacent >>

“They are a global phenomenon,” he says. “Their live business is through the roof. I haven’t seen anything this big in my entire career on a global level.
"You can get that kind of explosive moment if you galvanise young music fans and find something they want to engage with – it goes worldwide incredibly quickly. That’s the beauty of social media and the internet: we sign locally but we market globally from day one. That’s a fundamental change in our business.”
By acting on pockets of support for the band that emerged online in places from Sweden and Italy to Australia and Canada, the company built support for the band before they’d had any airtime on the radio. This was particularly important in the US – an impossible nut to crack for British pop bands for more than 20 years.
Sony Music’s US division picked up on a campaign called “Bring 1D to me”, originally developed in the UK, which encouraged fans to pitch for the band 
to play in their area. As a result, What Makes You Beautiful, their first single available to buy on iTunes in the US, sold 130,000 copies in a week and entered the top ten without any airplay.
Gatfield says this has completely changed the dynamic of launching an act, enabling music companies to bypass the traditional radio-station gatekeepers.
“Traditionally you’d have to persuade radio to support it and there’d be a long, hard slog while you built up the support and marketed them on the back of airplay,” he says. “This is the other way round: you market them and then airplay is the accelerator.”
He adds that he would be loathe to sign an act that had no social media profile. “All that would say to me was that they hadn’t got sufficient wherewithal or drive.”

DPAK/MAG AD formats Warp ad eg

A useful piece of evidence that vinyl and other formats are increasingly used, especially by Indie companies, to give their releases a PR boost and help get them talked about/reviewed. There have even been a few releases recently on cassette!

TOWID (The Only Way Is Digital)

2013 is clearly set to see digitisation continue apace, with analogue media being displaced by digital media which are typically cheaper to produce and distribute. That doesn't mean that analogue media, such as films shot on 35mm and distributed as 35mm prints to cinemas (each print costing £000s), will disappear, but that bit by bit the industry is moving over to digital content.
Here's some useful stats from this article, about Google buying a 10%, $50m stake in the video distributor Vevo (the joint Sony/Universal venture that you'll have come across if you've watched a few videos on YouTube, given how much of the music industry their artist sales represent):

Earlier this month the Entertainment Retailers Association reported that downloads of music, TV shows, films and video games topped £1bn in the UK for the first time in 2012. Digital music sales grew but revenue from physical singles fell by 44% year on year and albums dropped 11%.

The cinema industry and CD sales remain strong but, like newspapers, which are also seeing circulation declining rapidly as more people access their news online, may not have a bright future. The record set by Skyfall, 2012's Bond movie, may never be beaten: it became the first movie to take in over £100m at the UK box office by the last week in December 2012 (it was already the biggest ever UK cinema hit, and topped $1bn worldwide).

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?