Tagged: YouTube
AllNovaScotia punk’d by Denis Ryan
[Updated below] Our friends at AllNovaScotia (subscription required) appear to have been punk’d by [restaurateur] singing investor Denis Ryan and Halifax folksinger-comedian Tony Quinn in a YouTube spoof of a profane Irish expat turning the air blue-green with outrage over the Emerald Isle’s financial travails.
The NSFW clip identifies Quinn as a reporter for “the Financial News,” which morphs to “the Financial Times” in the AllNS piece. As alert Contrarian reader DR points out, however, the clip does not turn up on any site calling itself ’Financial News,’ and the reporter definitely doesn’t say, ‘Financial Times.’
Also, the ‘reporter’ looks and sounds remarkably like local comedian Tony Quinn. You’ll note that at no point does any text pop up ID’ing Denis Ryan, as would normally happen in an authentic news clip, nor is there the omnipresent news agency watermark on the lower right corner. And, finally, the clip ends with a Michael Flatley joke.
Still, as an exercise in Peter Capaldi-grade malediction, the skit is, ah, bracing. Cover your ears, Grandma:
With only 36,000 views when AllNS went to bed last night, the clip barely had the sniffles, but as of 3 p.m., today, it’s on it’s way to modest viral status, with 274,281 airings. That’s well shy of How to Be Alone (2.1 million), United Breaks Guitars territory (9.6 million), or Picnicface (21.9 million) real estate, to cite three Bluenose examples, but not bad for a pair of ‘sixties geezers.
Quinn’s speaker’s bureau website, incidentally, bills him as offering “clean, corporate and convention musical comedy.” Well, he doesn’t swear in the clip.
Update: Roger Ebert gets with the program.
Sauce for the goose, not sauce for the Google
Until its cave-in to Verizon last month, Google was the most prominent corporate advocate of net neutrality—but only for others, not for itself. Recently, Google has applied self-serving filters to its search results in a manner reminiscent of, say, China.
Late in July, Google searches began filtering out any results for the website bestofyoutube.com, an aggregator of videos from the Google-owned video site.
I can understand why Google might have a problem with bestofyoutube, which, it could be argued, infringes Google’s intellectual property by poaching YouTube content. Mind you, it would be a brazen case for Google to make, given that YouTube itself contains petabytes of pirated content. Be that as it may, the proper remedy is to seek relief from the perceived offense through negotiations or in court.
The least-Googley solution is to skew the world’s knowledge database by misleading google searchers into thinking the offending website no longer exists.
In the past, Google has filtered search results for websites that try to game its search algorithm. That’s a different matter, possibly justifiable as necessary to protect the integrity of the search process. Pretending a company Google doesn’t like doesn’t exist undermines the integrity of the search algorithm.
Earlier complaints about Google gaming its own search results in a self-serving manner here and here.
Contrarian has asked Google’s media department for a comment but, you know, they’re quite big and we’re quite small. Don’t hold your breath.
Hat tip: SBD
Pomplamoose
Two weeks ago, Contrarian featured a exceptionally funny and creative YouTube video by two dorky techno musicians from Leeds, comprising two-thirds of the Brett Domino Trio. I didn’t say so at the time, but these guys strike me as worthy 2010 inheritors of the 1960s folk revival. They make their own music, using an assortment of real and pseudo instruments. They exemplify the indie knack for using the Internet to bypass industry middlemen en route to fans (and, potentially, a living).
Here, thanks to James Fallows, is a similar but even more successful YouTube group, Pomplamoose, covering the sublime Chordettes hit, Mr. Sandman:
Pomplamoose doesn’t have a record company or a publicist, and has never produced a CD, but some of their YouTube videos have been viewed four million times. They’re making a nice little living* selling MP3s on their website and on iTunes. In an interview with National Public Radio, bandmates Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn explained the rules underlying the genre.
“There’s no hidden sounds, there’s no lip-synching, there’s no overdubbing. What you see is what you hear,” Conte says. “Sometimes, there might be two or three Natalys harmonizing with herself, and then you’ll see those three videos juxtaposed together on the screen.”
“I guess I kinda don’t like how there’s such a pedestal for music culture and especially for band culture,” he says. “It just feels fake; it feels like smoke and mirrors. I feel like music doesn’t have to be like that. It can be something that’s very normal and very accessible.”
According to Dawn and Conte, the process of creating a song, shooting and editing a video, and posting it on YouTube only takes about a week. The duo buys mechanical licenses for all of its covers online, which is a quick and easy process.
“That’s the thing,” Dawn says. “People think that all of these things have to be done by geniuses behind huge desks or at the top of skyscrapers, but you can just go online and do it yourself.”
“If you can’t just do … the production, the instruments and everything all by yourself, then you do need help. That’s something that labels are really good at,” Dawn says. “If, for example, you’re somebody who writes songs, like Lady Gaga, and you need everything that’s gonna make you Lady Gaga, YouTube’s not gonna be able to do that. You need a big fat label. But if you’re just a band, I don’t think we’re in an era anymore where you need that sort of major backing.”
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* It can’t have hurt that Toyota tapped Pomlamoose’s Sandman cover for an Avalon ad.
United flirts with another ditty disaster
Buried in a Herald story about Dave Carroll‘s testimony before a passenger rights organization-sponsored hearing in Washington, lies this little nugget: Last week, for the first time since his YouTube hit went Stage 6 pandemic, Carroll inadvertently flew United Airlines—a long booked connecting flight to a gig in Chicago.
As the flight prepared for takeoff, a United attendant, apparently oblivious to Carroll’s musical history with the airline, chastised him for not placing his (Taylor?) guitar in an overhead bin. A nearby passenger watched in amusement.
“Oh, he’s going to write a song about you,” she said.
