Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Weird Al and his 8 days of coverage



Weird Al Yankovic has a new album out. Mandatory Fun.

To me, it wasn't how good his songs were that was interesting.
It was how he advertised for this album.

He said that he would reveal 1 new video in each day for each day. He certainly started out strong with Tacky, his parody of "Happy" by Pharrell. Then followed by "Word Crimes", and so on...

He could have just revealed everything on his website, or stuck with a particular website, or his Youtube channel, or VEVO like every other artist.

Instead... he did this:
1st video on Nerdist
2nd on VEVO
3rd on CollegeHumor
4th on Yahoo
5th on FunnyOrDie
6th on Popcrush
7th on his own YouTube channel
8th on The Wall Street Journal

The order of the website is interesting. Perhaps alluding to the amount of influence each site has on the release of his album (VEVO being a conglomerate of multiple record companies including Sony Music Entertainment, which label RCA is releasing this album), on him (He hosts a show on Nerdist), on the internet (CollegeHumor/Yahoo/Funny or Die) or on mainstream coverage (WSJ).

As the days went by, I was trying to guess both which song was going to be shown and the website on which it was to debut on.

The only one I don't understand is Popcrush. It's not a particularly big or important enough site for a Weird Al video to "exclusively" debut. As of writing this, it is still on the front page, albeit relegated to a link under "Latest News" [for something 3 days ago...].

Then again, by giving these websites exclusivity, he probably saved a lot of production / promotion fees for these videos. By grouping these videos together in a 8 day barrage, each website gets more views from different demographics and in turn, perhaps, encourage the person visiting to check out more of the site.

Out of his parodies in this album, there was one song that was left out. "Inactive", a parody of Imagine Dragons' "Radioactive was not made into a video. He did make the right choice though, I felt that it was the most uninspired song in the entire album. For parodies of the fluffy, he himself left a huge shadow with his 1988 song "Fat" [or even "Eat It" to that extent].

I leave you with my favourite song in this album:




EDIT:
Turns out most of it has been covered by The Atlantic. Oh wells.

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