EightBlack.

OK, it’s been an interesting week.

The Webjet Viral Video campaign is clearly work we are proud of. Here’s how it unfolded.

We saw 2 very smart young English guys on Google Idol - called Gary & Tom. I’ve written about them in previous posts.

We decided to approach them and ask them to do a promotional video for Webjet. They agreed.

Things started to become difficult at this point.

One of the guys had decided to move to New Zealand - why I’m not quite sure.

Anyway, we had to put one of them on a plane to the UK, track down the other guy and get them to record the content we wanted.

Countless conference calls and emails later and we get somewhere.

Gary and Tom ended up recording 2 pieces of music - we thought both were great. Client liked the second track better.

Then the hard part started.

Because the video that Gary and Tom produced had a commercial element, we needed legal sign off as far as copyright goes. Fair enough. Makes sense.

So we had to track down the artists involved and the various recording companies.

Wait till you hear this. And after you do, you’ll know why Shawn Fanning of Napster fame went ahead and set up Napster in the first place.

Ok, the song we used in the video is aptly titled “Fly Me Away”.

It was written by 2 people - so we needed to get their permission (or their representatives permission as I think they’d both be older than Methusla now).

So emails and phone calls start flying trying to track the authors down.

There are 2 companies representing the authors - Warner Chappell and Native Tongue. They each want $7,500 for the privilege to use the actual music (the lyrics) for the 4 week period the competition will run.

We then get told that because we used the Michael Buble version of the song, we had to seek permission from his record company as well.

Ok, no sweat. How much?

We recieve a very nice email from Warner Music advising us that $10,000 would be the minimum and that it would be subject to approval from Michael Buble’s management in the US (or Canada) and the recording company itself.

So now we’re at $25 grand, plus production costs.

Here’s the thing that record companies need to understand. It would be easier to tame a tsunami than try and stop all copyright infringement - especially now the internet has come of age.

The likes of Limewire, and the early edition of Napster all provided avenues to file share. And quickly.

Now I’m not advocating that people breach copyright law. But there’s got to be a better, more efficient way of working with the commercial world who want to use the music.

This whole process was insane.

The viral video was going to be sent to some 500,000 people. A smaller, digestible fee for permission to use the music along with a “Buy this song” link at the bottom of the video panel could have made the publishers and authors potentially a whole lot more.

It only required a 5% response rate (assuming they purchase the track off iTunes or similar for 99 cents).

There’s a good article in today’s Age about iTunes and file sharing.

I dont want the music industry to lose out to all the illegal download activity, but I think they do need to re-dress the balance and provide solutions that are workable.

It’s a real shame. The creative for Webjet was (and is) a cracker. But the original version by Gary and Tom wont see the light of day now.

Subscribe to more posts like this

Related Posts:

Add to | | | View blog reactions

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 7:31 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.