The band’s latest music video uses HTML5 technology to render their multi-screen dance. It also offers the viewer a chance to sequence a part of the choreography.
No matter what happens in real life, the internet keeps on truckin’, gifting us random videos for us all to laugh at. They might be funny but they also are a peek into our humanity and society at large (Ahem). Here are ten of the best LOLs of the year:
– Early in January, with the country in the grip of the aftermath of snow, one intrepid Dublin city explorer was caught falling on camera by RTE News. The sound of his body hitting the pavement became a sound heard around the world with over 1.5 million views.
– The comedic South African rave-rap group went all the way to a major label deal after their videos ‘Zef Side’ and ‘Enter the Ninja’ freaked the bejaysis out of everyone who saw them.
You might not be heading to Austin, Texas for the big music industry fest that is South By Southwest yourself (watch out for coverage in Day and Night in two weeks) but that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of the fact that 1,500 bands are looking for global attention. The official site SXSW.com contains artist pages with MP3s for many of the acts playing including Broken Bells, She & Him, Fanfarlo, The XX and many, many more. If you prefer to grab them all in go, there are two torrents available with over 1,000 MP3s. If passive selective listening is more your thing, NPR have a streaming radio show on their site with takes 100 MP3s of the best bands playing and repeats it ad infinitum.
Following on from OK Go’s recent Youtube/label music video problems which were documented here two weeks ago, the Chicago band have found a way to resolve the issue of non-embeddable Youtube videos for their fans.
The band released a new version of the video for This Too Shall Pass and chances are you’ve already seen it. After a week, this new video had 6.6 million views (compared to 1.1 for the marching band version). The video shows the domino effect in action via a Rube Goldberg machine: an elaborate warehouse setup where marbles, globes, cards, blocks, household objects, cars, pulleys, slides and levers combine to make a thrilling four minutes of viewing.
Crucially, the video can now be placed on any other site other than Youtube thanks to an insurance company from Chicago called State Farm. In a first for music videos, State Farm paid an undisclosed sum to allow embedding of the video on every other site on the internet, as well as a credit at the end of the clip and their logo on two of the domino objects in the video. Everyone wins here. OK Go get mad viral hits and more buzz. Their label EMI get paid by State Farm who get global advertising and fans can do what they want with the video.
Speaking of innovative initiatives in music videos, check out French band Uniform Motion’s unique approach to theirs. They produced an interactive animation that can be customised and sent to friends. You can pick any track from their second album to soundtrack it, you can type a message to appear in the video and the result is an animated performance of the song you chose with the customisation intact. View an example.
Whether you like them or not, Chicago rock band OK Go are probably on your radar. This is almost exclusively down to the success of a viral music video for their song Here it Goes Again in 2006. The video which showed the band doing choreographed moves on four treadmills is one of the internet’s most popular videos of all-time with nearly 50 million views and ended up winning a Grammy award the following year.
Four years later and OK Go are learning that the online landscape of 2010 is a different beast. The band released a new album Of The Blue Color Of The Sky at the start of the year. To promote it, they got the Notre Dame marching band involved and shot a music video, but when the video was released the band were deluged with complaints. Why? The band’s record label EMI had blocked the embedding of the video as well as blocking broadcast in other countries, disabling fans’ ability to share and embed the video on their own blog or profile.
Since the success of OK Go’s viral video, the four major labels have gone after Youtube as a source of revenue. The agreement works by Youtube only paying the label for views that are streamed from Youtube.com. The result? EMI have disabled all their artist videos as have Sony BMG. So if you want to embed an official Ke$ha video you’re out of luck there too. Continue Reading..»
