When NBC yanked the “Lazy Sunday” clip, that was understandable, in a way. It was on sale for $1.99 on iTunes and available to watch on NBC.com (as long as you didn’t use Mac or Linux). But it was also, in the eyes of many observers, a big mistake. Saturday Night Live is a show that’s been accused more than once of being irrelevant, even moribund. Five million people watched that video, including young people, who may have never watched SNL before. For several weeks, it was a genuine cultural phenomenon. You really can’t buy advertising like that.
Contrast “Lazy Sunday” with another popular clip, the “real life” Simpsons intro, in which actors recreate the show’s opening-credits sequence. That was produced as an ad by the British network Sky One to hype its run of that season’s episodes. In order to get the same type of contagious buzz NBC tried to quash, Sky itself quietly leaked the clip to YouTube — and in short order it had more views than “Lazy Sunday.”
These days many studios and networks are houses divided against themselves: the legal department on one side and the marketing department on the other. As lawyers dry out their tongues licking stamps for cease-and-desist notices, other companies are getting wise to YouTube’s potential. MTV2 shows preview videos on the site, and E! uses it as a tie-in with its clip show, The Soup. Hollywood Records, trying to promote its Queen DVD, put the band’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” video on the site. (In a nifty bit of cross-promotion, the clip also encouraged viewers to tune in to Fox’s American Idol, one episode of which featured contestants singing Queen songs.) The Weinstein Company partnered with the site to show trailers and other promo material for flicks including Scary Movie 4 and Clerks II.
YouTube just secured a second round of funding: $8 million of venture-capital green. “That allows us to expand on all fronts: marketing, sales, infrastructure, being able to build out our data centers around the world,” says Supan, adding, “We’re seeing a huge cultural shift happening right now in digital-media entertainment and how it’s being distributed.”
This is not Napster redux. Unless it’s taken down, or dismantled and built up again as a corporate portal for pay video — as Napster was for music — YouTube is not going away anytime soon. And the sheer volume of it all makes the idea of scrubbing away all the cool (and copyrighted) stuff unrealistic. In the meantime, people are watching.
THEY WERE THERE FIRST: Gnarls Barkely's “Crazy,” the UK’s first number-one single based on digital sales alone, was available via The Hype Machine way back in October. |
And then there’s music
The still-new but suddenly omnipresent phenomenon of mp3 blogs is a fraught and murky area. But for now, at least, it looks as though the big record companies may have learned some lessons since Napster first appeared in 1999. By strict letter of the law, of course, most people who maintain mp3 blogs enable copyright infringement. But there are differences, hardly insignificant, between the blogs and the file sharing so loathed by the RIAA. They have to do with scale and intent.
