Fan-Produced Videos: Shaking It Up, Or Just Another Way To Save Money?
Our inbox gets at least one press release touting a “fan-made video” contest a day, so the piece in today’s Los Angeles Times that examined the phenomenon, pegged around the success of the “fans only” version of Shakira’s video for “Hips Don’t Lie”, piqued our interest:
It’s an equation that the labels can’t help but love — fans pump in labor, attention and enthusiasm, and artists reap sales. And at least at this point in the cycle, when we’ve yet to see any significant contest backlash, scandal or cynicism, many fans seem energized by the proliferating attempts to pull them into the marketing loop. For Epic’s senior vice president of marketing Lee Stimmel, who was one of the minds behind “Hips Don’t Lie (Fans-Only Version),” enabling Shakira’s music to galvanize a worshipful fan populace meant more than the song’s pop-chart ranking or radio airplay.
“It’s very hard in the media matrix world that we live in to see how a song actually resonates with a fan base and makes that fan base grow,” Stimmel said. “We showed that it can virally and organically grow. That’s something you can’t necessarily buy with traditional media. That one-to-one relationship with customers became the most powerful part of the promotion.”
The article runs down all the recent attempts to get fans involved in the video-making process, and it’s a long one–it includes green-screen competitions like The Decemberists’, and Good Charlotte’s call for photos for its “The River” video. Sure, the idea that fans are more involved in the process of promoting music seems nice in theory, but the sheer amount of artists that are calling upon their fans to help them out, video-wise, (really, you should see the number of press releases we get about “contests” like this very day) makes this process seem like it’s rapidly becoming an extension of the “street team” concept–i.e. a way to extend the promotional budget through hiring cheap, or free, labor. Most telling about this whole idea, and how executives really view it as a large-scale promotional tool: What’s hailed as the most succesful example of this phenomenon–the Shakira one–was supplemented by a traditional big-budget clip directed by Sophie Muller.
(Also, we know it was before the Web 2.0 era, but no article on fan-produced clips should omit at least a passing reference to Bon Jovi’s “Bad Medicine”–a pioneer of the genre that, thanks to the presence of the late Sam Kinison, looks like the band merely ran out of ideas, and not money.)
