I’m so in love with Blink-182 right now! The band is getting ready for their first new single in eight years, and they came up with a pretty fascinating way to promote the song. They teamed up with AT&T and found every instance of where a fan was using their music without permission in their videos on YouTube. Then the band took a few dozen of the videos and spliced them together to create a music video for their new single, Up All Night. Then they named all the fans at the end of the video that were represented in their video.
And they thanked them.
What I love about this move is that Blink-182 was smart enough to realize that these were FANS of the band. Sure, they were technically violating copyright by using the band’s music, but I would wager many of the fans didn’t even know that they couldn’t add the music to their videos. And they all were promoting a band that they were fans of.
So Blink-182 was smart enough to recognize that, and reward the behavior, instead of punishing it. There’s an important branding lesson here for companies: You don’t own your brand, it belongs just as much to your fans and customers as it does to you. The best you can hope for is to co-own that brand with your customers.
Here is the video montage that Blink-182 created:
And here is one of the videos that one of the fans mentioned in the video created:
Remember, create something amazing for the people that love you.
Great idea !!
That’s a great point. I can’t stand it when I’m reading an article about a favorite band (or when somebody posts a video on facebook,) and then when I go to play it, I find that the owner of the video has disabled it from being shared.
You are right. Bands need to award the fans for sharing and publicizing their material.