Unstaged

If the best thing to come from the American Express/Arcade Fire/Terry Gilliam/MSG quadfecta (with Youtube and Vevo, a sextecta) turns out to be this Behind the Scenes video, then I'm sold. More sponsored YouTube events pairing music and video. Dig Gilliam as the likable, believable host and narrator.


Overall the event seems to have been successful and replicable.

You watch it live (on Youtube) or catch it later (on YouTube), just like you'd use a DVR (but embeddable and social-media-distribution-ready). And you get "American Express Presents", tastefully. The rest is the filmmaker and the band doing their things, but together and seemingly unfettered by instructions.

this here video, but one of many from the night, has 68,000 views after less than a week. it'll be on the internet forever. Our kids are going to be slurping that American Express sponsorship, man. How do you measure the worth of The Sponsorship that does not die associated with a band people already consider classic? That has got to be some ROI, it gosta. At least until someone purges the internet.

speaking of the power of youtube........Youtube and Vevo kinda just raspberried MTV. A liscensing dispute between Vevo and MTV ended with Universal Music Group yanking its artists (Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Kanye) from all MTV sites. Basically Vevo wants to "power videos we have under license" as a syndication partner to every major outlet that wants to feature music videos online. Sounds like they are asking for a lot until you consider the logic of UMG (who partnered with Google/YouTube to launch Vevo):

"In less than 8 months since its launch, Vevo has already become the web's #1 rated video network with over 49 million unique visitors monthly, dramatically eclipsing those on MTV's online properties, while attracting scores of major advertisers and tens of millions in advertising dollars."

MTV Networks president Van Toffler in regard to competing online with Vevo: "We haven’t really unlocked the great visual history we have in music across our channels around the globe, which we’re slowly going to do." Key word here is slowly.