The other day I wrote about The Hold Steady’s efforts to get fans to upload videos they can use in promoting their new record. I chided them demanding the copyright on those videos. Here is a better version of the same idea in promotion of Yo La Tengo’s new record called “I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass.” This is a YouTube group:

The concept of this Group is simple. Videotape yourself saying “I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass”, upload the video, add the tag “beatyourass” and add it to this group. Once the YouTube servers update (between 6-12 hours), your video will appear on the wall of videos located here: http://www.iamnotafraidofyo…

Both the YouTube group page and the Iamnotafraidofyou…com page then have links for more information and samples from the new album. In contrast to The Hold Steady, this has all the appeal of a bottom-up buzz vs. a top heavy fan phenomenon, even though the concept is pretty much the same. With this one you can check in continuously to see if there are new contributions, so it engenders much more continued involvement. It’s a lot less clear in the Yo La Tengo site whether the band and their label (Matador) are responsible for launching this or if it’s a true fan-led initiative, but either way, they’ve succeeded in keeping the feel of a fan-driven activity, and that’s great.

Thanks to David for the tip. Tips are always welcome, so if you see cool stuff happening, please don’t be shy about shooting me an email and letting me know.

Warner Brothers and YouTube have reached a deal for the use of WB music on YouTube

Under a revenue-sharing deal announced Monday, New York-based Warner Music has agreed to transfer thousands of its music videos and interviews to YouTube, a San Mateo, Calif.-based startup that has become a cultural touchstone since two 20-something friends launched the company in a Silicon Valley garage 19 months ago.

The best part in my POV is this:

Perhaps even more important for YouTube is that Warner Music has agreed to license its songs to the millions of ordinary people who upload their homemade videos to the Web site

….

To make the deal happen, YouTube developed a royalty-tracking system that will detect when homemade videos are using copyrighted material. YouTube says the technology will enable Warner Music to review the video and decide whether it wants to approve or reject it.

So long as they don’t get too heavy handed in rejecting things, this is a terrific step forward in legitimizing the value of fans’ creative activities.

Last summer I saw a talk sponsored by the Aspen Institute on “The Digital Future” with Mark Cuban. For those who don’t know, Cuban made one of his fortunes by selling his media streaming company Broadcast.com to Yahoo way back in the 1990s. He’s now the owner of HDNet, the first all-high definition tv network and, more famously, the Dallas Mavericks. He’s also got a number of side projects like his movie theaters, his investigative stock report, and his blog aggregator. It was the first time I’d heard Cuban, and I came away with the impression of a man who’s really smart, knowledgable, and who’s got an integrated vision of how it all fits together.

He’s written on his blog that convergence is over, everything is already digital, and he argues that media content ought to be available in any form the consumers want it. My favorite line of the night was his summary of this position: “bits are bits, I can deliver. I’m agnostic, I don’t care how it gets there.” But, other than the need to provide them with a variety of delivery platforms, there was very little said about media audiences in the talk, and I wondered what Cuban would have to say about the changing role(s) of the media viewers as fans also get more control over bits and bytes and make their own products, connections with one another, and so on.

So I shot him an email and asked, and (with his permission to reprint), here’s what he had to say:

Its nothing new. Its been going on for years. From fan clubs to high school clubs to CompuServe and Prodigy forums and usenet groups and AOL discussion groups and chat rooms to IRC rooms. People contract their sphere of connections to where they can either feel smart/important, feel comfortable as part of a group, or can improve their communications. Today they call that social networking and it happens on discussion forums for sports teams, on myspace, friendster, xanga and many other sites.

Youtube is an old concept. The only difference between what they have been able to do and others is that the copyright police didn’t shut them down. Two years ago they get closed down faster than you can say RIAA.

You are right, there is no question that fandom and online community has increased, but I think it can be traced back to digital content organizations giving social networking a pass rather than shutting them down.

Youtube is a perfect example. All the people putting up their favorite songs on their myspace pages is another. No way the RIAA lets that happen 2/3 years ago. If they did, all the old hosting companies like geocities would have thrived and evolved rather than devolved.

The concept of friends is just a better implementation of website rings. Blogs are just templates for daily entries on websites.

Broadband made it more fun to be online, faster to participate and enabled the faster, smoother use of media/video/audio.

When I bought the mavs I got on discussion groups to answer questions, most are the same today.

When I started my blog, it just made it easier than updating a page on the Mavs website.

Putting up trailers on sites is old news, as is downloading movies. For all the discussion about progress, look back 5 years and ask just how much broadband progress has been made. Broadband has gotten marginally faster, but dramatically cheaper from competition.

I guess what Im saying, its just business as usual. Like the fashion world, pants are pants, shirts are shirts, they just seem cooler when they are first coming out in new styles, but when we look back, we realize it was no big deal.

I appreciate the perspective he brings here, that fandom has been going on for a long time and that its boom right now may be triggered more by changes in the legalistic environment than by real transformations of technological capability or ways that fans engage the media and one another [rumour has it Universal Music Group is going to sue MySpace and YouTube for copyright infringement]. When I look at online fan groups now, I certainly see a lot of the same dynamics and processes I was seeing when I started writing about them in 1991.

At the same time, I’m not sure it’s really “business as usual.” Audiences may have been doing these things all along, but they weren’t getting noticed as they are now, and they weren’t getting addressed and engaged directly by the objects of their fandom in the way they are now. I think those create real changes in the expectations fans develop about the people behind the teams/music/shows/movies/etc that they love, and in how those people need to behave toward fans to make the most of what they’re doing. Technological capabilities and fans’ uses of them may not have changed much, but the social/commercial environment in which these things happen has.

“Competitive intelligence” company Hitwise lets you look at their data on top websites and top search terms by industry in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

For the most part, the information is pretty obvious, but there are some interesting things in there pertaining to the popularity of fan activity online. For instance, the top 10 search terms for the music industry in both the US and the UK:

• lyrics and song lyrics are the top 2
• guitar tabs is the third in US, 4th in UK
• Myspace gets counted twice (with and without a .com at the end) so comes in even higher than it appears in the US, doesn’t make top 10 in UK.
• free music downloads is only #6 in the US (#7 if you account for the MySpace error), and it doesn’t make the top 10 in the UK.
• the British are way more into festivals, but we knew that, didn’t we?

So one of the main things people want the internet to help them do with music is play along. How cool is that. Too bad all those lyric and guitar tab sites are illegal.

I’m already starting to feel a bit Lonelygirl15ed out, but had to comment on this set of quotes from the filmmakers:

The creators said Tuesday that they never intended to stage a hoax or trick people into believing their characters were real.”We never wanted to lie to people,” Beckett said.

“Our job from the beginning was not to trick people. It was to create a character that was believable,” Flinders said.

The trio began posting individually scripted and filmed episodes online and began incorporating changes based on reactions and suggestions from fans.

The result is part video game, where viewers exercise some measure of control over the characters, and part mystery novel, complete with hidden clues and cliffhanger chapters that left viewers wanting more.

Flinders writes scripts for each episode and the actress playing Bree delivers her lines with a persuasive power that still has some online viewers believing she is genuine, even after her creators posted their online confession several days ago.

Excuse me, guys, but when you have profiles posted on social networking sites and someone sending emails to the New York Times and signing them “Bree” when you know darn well the person you’re sending them to is questioning Bree’s existence, you are trying to trick people. There’s nothing wrong with fiction, and it’s great if they’ve got more viewers now that we know it’s fiction, but when you try to make a character so real that people believe she exists, you’re trying to trick them, don’t pretend otherwise.

I like the idea of a video series that encourages fan involvement, think it’s a great use of YouTube and MySpace, and am somewhat relieved to hear that this turns out to be indie guys and not, oh, Disney, but I just don’t like deception. Maybe I’m funny that way.