Ed. note: It's time for another installment of "VHS Or Beta?", where Andy Beta looks at the music behind the movies—from preserved-by-Criterion classics to completely inane summer blockbusters. In this installment, he looks at the recent film by the Frenchmen Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo, Daft Punk's Electroma:
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Nearly two years ago, Google dropped $1.65 billion on YouTube. As one can imagine, the company's imagineers are trying to come up with all sorts of fun ways to make money, including a doohickey that links to Amazon's MP3 store and iTunes from videos. There are also plans to sell concert tickets and merch and other things. Sounds neat, right?
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The latest act to go the "find your new lead singer on YouTube" route: The Chipmunks, because, well, there's no better way to capitalize on an Internet trend than by coming up with an ill-conceived "viral" contest based on said trend's tired concept 10 months after the fact. Anyway, so far, there are only five people who have signed up for this particular honor, perhaps because the ill-advised phrase "Get Munked" is being used as its rallying cry. But you shouldn't let that stop you! Or your dog! [YouTube]
Prog-rock giants Yes are celebrating their 40th anniversary this year, but one person isn't feeling festive: Lead singer Jon Anderson, who's on doctor-ordered bed rest for the rest of 2008 after suffering "acute respiratory failure" in June. Anderson's illness resulted in the band canceling its milestone-celebrating jaunt earlier this summer, but as the leaves turn, so does the membership of Yes: The remaining members have announced that it's recruited Benoit David, lead singer of the Montreal-based Yes tribute band Close To The Edge (tagline: "It wont be Yes playing, but if you close your eyes, you might think twice..."), to serve as Anderson's replacement for a North American tour that kicks off in November. So how will David sound? Well, since Yes is apparently flogging the "we found him on YouTube" story that worked so well for other band's lead-singer swaps, I figured the time was right to go right to the source. Clip of David performing with his now-former band after the jump.
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A Pennsylvania woman can go ahead and sue Universal Music Corp. for making YouTube take down a 29-second clip of her baby dancing to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy," according to a judge in San Jose, Calif. The judge said that Universal, which controls the publishing rights to the Purple One's catalog, needs to decide whether or not the snippet fell under the "fair use" guidelines, although given the company's past history of negotiating with the Internet I'm going to guess their stance is "the only fair use is use that involves paying us." [AP]
Obviously taking a lift from the Web series Yacht Rock, a series of videos titled Memoirs Of Michael McDonald have been released to promote McDonald's latest album, Soul Speak. Introduced by music historian "Alistair Pennywhistle," the clips share scenes from the singer's past, which usually consist of a young Michael (already with white hair and a beard) consoling children on the playground with a classic cover after bullying or a hamster funeral. Sounds like it could be another online hit, but Universal Music Group is rather protective of its advertising campaigns, and the allegedly promotional films can only be seen through AOL and the label's YouTube page. Which means most of the people seeing the clips are Michael McDonald fans, who aren't really feeling them.
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When even the Associated Press is sending up trend-story signal flares about the current, crappy state of the world, there's only one song to sorta-fit the collective mood: Daniel Powter's "Bad Day," which I have come clean about enjoying before and which has an attendant YouTube comment section that's 45% semi-anonymous support group, 35% incoherent assholes, 20% comments along the lines of "I'm eating chips right now! Wow that was random lol," and 100% desperately in need of The Elements Of Style being thrown its way:
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Avril Lavigne's video for "Girlfriend" is currently YouTube's all-time No. 2 clip, having been viewed some 88,739,107 (and counting) times; it's playing second fiddle by some million views to the "inspirational comedian" Judson Laipply's "Evolution Of Dance," a clip that jerks the "OMG, remember this?!?!" chain harder than Girl Talk and is even less enjoyable to experience than Gregg Gillis' most recent nostalgia trip. (How many people have actually sat through its entire six minutes? Surely it has to be a fraction of the 89 million-plus views it's garnered.) Well, now that Avril Lavigne's fanbase is home from school for the summer, its members have started a campaign to oust "Evolution Of Dance" from the top spot—and they're not above engaging in some HTML trickery to get the result they so desperately need.
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When Weezer's YouTube-"inspired" video for "Pork & Beans" initially came out, it had one unintentionally hilarious aspect: Its official version wasn't embeddable, a policy that was in keeping with the semi-walled garden YouTube policies of the band's major-label overlords, Universal Music Group, but seemed odd given that the whole point of the video was for it to become a meme and garner lulz from people who still think Tay Zonday is worth a chuckle. Shortly after this bit of cognitive dissonance was pointed out, Universal took the embed blocks off the clip, "Pork & Beans" hit it big on Digg, and all was well—until Weezer's latest self-titled album got a sales beatdown from Disturbed on the album charts. (Aww.) Fast-forward to last night, when the Silicon Alley Insider noted that the clip's no longer embeddable! What gives, man? I thought Weezer was for the geek-children!
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Quotable
The director of Weezer's "remember that thing on YouTube? wasn't that funny?" video for "Pork & Beans" speaks about his, ahem, "inspiration" for the clip: "When I heard 'Pork and Beans,' I loved its non-conformist message and felt like it was a natural anthem for the self-expression that's been taking shape on YouTube and the Internet. At that point, I connected the dots and wanted to create Weezer's mash-up of their favorite popular culture of the Internet—a viral music video made of virals, rather than just a traditional music video." Seriously, dude? I thought that your concept was more along the lines of "hey, we can probably get some easy Internet buzz by reminding all those kids of things they laughed at six or eight months ago, and the 'talent' will cost a lot less than Playboy bunnies." Shows you what I know. [Buzzworthy]
By now, you've probably heard that Prince put his own spin on Radiohead's "Creep" at Coachella last month. However, any recorded evidence of the cover has been removed from the Internet faster than you can say Prince and the New Web Sheriff Generation. (One copy might remain below the cut.) But does Prince actually have the right to ask for removal of the clips?
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At least on YouTube, where searches for his name came in second only to "sex" during last month. Compete.com has released the top 25 search terms on the video-sharing site for last month, and there is some good news for the music business buried within: music-related search terms made up 16 of the 25 top queries, with the number of hunts for Chris Brown and "No Air" even beating out the number of searches for "porn." (OK, so people looking for that sort of thing are probably over at YouPorn, but never let it be said that searching for sex on the Internet isn't something of an eternal quest.) Full list after the jump.
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If episode 3—with its stalling narrative and repetitive dialogue—was the filler episode of the ongoing Jobromance series, episode 4 is its tour-de-force masterwork. Emogurl810 kicks things up a notch with yet another love subplot, and an almost entirely indecipherable (and therefore possibly brilliant?) match-making sequence in the park, complete with slapstick clichés and an amusing accidental double-entendre.
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The JoBromance—the YouTubed Jonas Brothers homage that combines the art of the cobbled-together tribute video with the hair-raising creepiness of fan fiction—continues full steam ahead in episode three, as the gang investigates a mysterious dispute, and emogurl810 once again eschews the conventions of the narrative form.
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If you've been on YouTube today, you may have noticed that the front page is curiously devoid of videos like "Todd's Oscars rant" and "Monkey eats cheese." Instead, Iceland's second-most-famous weirdo musicians, Sigur Ròs, have taken over the site for the day, and anyone can watch their tour documentary Heima in its entirety (for free!). They've also selected ten fan-made videos submitted to the Minn Heima contest to be featured on the front page. Most of the videos use leftover footage from Heima, but at least one out of ten Sigur Ròs fans is going to be artsy enough to dabble in stop-motion animation. Let's review a few of the more notable entires.
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Idolator
