performance
musicians wanted
photo by Sebastian Kim
As I stream The xx on MySpace — for the fifth delicious time today — let’s talk about music and money.
Clearly I’m a little late to the party, but I’ve just been reading about YouTube’s new revenue sharing program. Have you heard about it? Musicians Wanted is a partner plan for independent artists — and the key word is indie. You need to own the global rights to publish and distribute your own video content.
Here’s how it works:
Artists earn monthly revenue from both “relevant” ads overlaid on their original videos and banner ads that run beside the viewer window. They also earn dividends when their YouTube videos are embedded on external websites, such as music blogs (a huge selling point for popular artists), and bands can add tour dates and links-to-purchase for albums and merchandise.
Interested artists have to apply, and they’re evaluated on factors including video popularity, number of channel subscribers, and their involvement in the YouTube community at large. Videos also have to meet quality requirements (i.e. no loopy screen savers paired with an audio track). What’s especially interesting is that YouTube employees will choose which acts are accepted, essentially turning them into digital music scouts.
The first band to join up? OK Go, which left EMI / Capitol earlier this year to start its own label — and since everyone and their grandmother watched the addictive treadmill video for “Here It Goes Again,” they’ve definitely got the audience to make it work.
OK Go also got tongues wagging for using State Farm Insurance money to make its “This Too Shall Pass” video. A toy truck with a tiny State Farm logo on its door gets the action rolling and at the end, the screen reads: “OK Go thanks State Farm for making this video possible.”
Whether they’re savvy or sell-outs is your call — the arrangement has been heavily debated in both business and music circles — but the band has demonstrated that it’s willing to get cozy with mainstream brands in order to keep producing quirky, highly viral videos.
As for the YouTube program, the mere idea is another notch in the vinyl for indie artists. Major label representation is not the promised land of the past, and as more and more musicians choose to control their own careers, viable revenue models will continue to evolve and expand. The program’s other upside is its potential to spotlight innovative visual artists and bands that apply real creativity to their videos. After all, the more people view the vids, the more cash flows into deserving pockets.
OK Go
brief encounters
aerialist Keely Sills
What happens when you cross a marketing executive with a theatrical dance artist? How about a floral designer and an African drummer? If you’re lucky, you get Brief Encounters — the ultimate live mashup created by Vancouver’s Tomorrow Collective.
Produced by Katy Harris-McLeod and Mara Branscombe, each installment matches 12 artists in six unexpected pairings. The partners meet just two weeks before the show to create a 10-minute live performance. The results are strange, unpredictable and sometimes even breathtaking.
I had been meaning for months to check out Brief Encounters (they’re on installment #14), and a well-timed text finally got me in the audience on Saturday. Two high points of the night included a moving collaboration between hip hop dancer Yoshi Hisanaga and visual artist Yun Lam Li, and the partnership between aerialist Keely Sills and acclaimed storyteller Ivan Coyote.
producers Mara Branscombe and Katy Harris-McLeod
It all comes down to chemistry. Hisanaga and Li joked about their generation gap in an intro video, but blended video, music and masterful live dancing into an experience that stunned the silent crowd. Then, suspended high above the stage, Sills effortlessly flipped and stretched her body through the silks while Coyote wove a restrained tale of love, loss and family. Magic.
There will always be bigger hits and a few near-misses, but I love the spirit of this series. It made me think more deeply about collaboration — and breaking boundaries. What could give your work new colour? And why not impose a two-week timeline on an ambitious project? It’s an effective way to stop procrastinating and second-guessing yourself. There simply isn’t time.
Creativity is always pulsing below the surface, but sometimes it takes an impossible deadline (and flat-out panic) to push past what feels like a barrier. We’ve all had 11th hour triumphs. This show demonstrated that time and collaboration are ingredients — elements you can mix at will to create something surprising.