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The 38th Chamber from The Publics
It's been interesting to watch the spread of the Lego Wu-Tang video since we put it up on Wednesday night, in a post that I thought people would find amusing but with little expectations for it to generate much discussion. Davo originally put his video up on vimeo in late June, getting a few dozen hits in just under a month's time. Rafi, the self-proclaimed "web's favorite aggregator's favorite aggregator," linked to our post in his rss feed a few hours later, at which point Miss Info, nahright and 2dopeboyz picked up on it. From there it trickled down to a lot of other sites, including digg, and by the end of the next day over 40,000 people had seen it. It must be rather bizarre to wake up one morning and discover that, out of the blue, several thousand people have suddenly become aware of one of your projects. The numbers have begun to tail off, but at last count the video was creeping up on 80,000 views in less than a week (over 100,000 if you count the views on the two other Lego Wu-Tang videos Davo put up).
I suppose there's a lesson to be learned from this that can be applied to marketing your work on the internet, whether it be a video, a song or whatever else you've created: no matter how great it might be, there's a good chance your work will go unnoticed if you don't make the effort to let people know about it (and this is by no means a shot at Davo, who I don't think ever had any grand intentions for his video, he just happens to serve as a good example). The average internet user, and even more so the average blogger with a public email address, is exposed to so much new content on a daily basis that there's little incentive for them to switch from their habit of passively consuming whatever is sent to them to actively searching the net to discover something new on their own. Force people to pay attention, or be relegated to obscurity.
I happened to find the Lego video during a random search for Wu-Tang videos, and if Rafi hadn't linked to it that might have been the end of it. For every niche subject covered on the web, though, there are typically only a handful of "cornerstone" sites (in the case of hip hop, nahright and Miss Info would be two of those cornerstones) you need to get featured on to reach a majority of your target demographic. Once you get the attention of a few of those sites your work is essentially done, as you'll find that dozens of other sites, twitterers and every other type of outlet for content will follow suit and continue to propagate the link without you having to do anything further. It's debatable whether the main strength of these cornerstone sites is simply to offer exposure to a large audience (and in this day and age, many members of said audience are likely to be bloggers themselves) that might not otherwise have seen your work, or if these sites truly do act as tastemakers able to dictate what their crowd of followers should like (or at least pretend to like, if only to fit in with the rest of the crowd). Whatever the reason, the end result - more people linking to your work leading to increased exposure - is the same.
Of course, the idea that you have to actively promote your work in order to get exposure isn't exactly a revelation on my part. As anyone who has ended up on a list for promotional e-mails can tell you, just about any artist looking to break into hip hop has a team of promoters backing them up, blasting out emails to thousands of people on an hourly basis. Perhaps the better question is how to promote your work in such a way that it stands out from the crowd. I don't have an answer for that - yet - but if you ever find the formula for success my advice would be to have a second project on standby so that you can build on that momentum.
I don't expect the above video, put together by The Publics, will have the same impact that the Lego video did (there's something about Legos that seems to give them a universal appeal), but it's still quite good. The video uses footage from a pair of old Asian movies - feel free to correct me in the comments, but I believe the first scene is from Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai while I'm not sure what film was used for the second part of the video - as the backdrop to two songs from El Michels Affair's Enter The 37th Chamber (itself a reinterpretation of some of Wu's classic material, and well worth picking up if you haven't already). I have to admit I was never a huge fan of the EMA remake of Shimmy Shimmy Ya, but here it matches up perfectly with the fiery death scene.
7/27/2009 3:00:51 PM posted by Fresh