At a time when YouTube is the 2nd most used search engine in the world and my 11-year old knows 25 viral videos off the top of his head, this electronic dance music band from Great Britain has found an incredibly effective way to market a song. Just try and watch this sports highlight video without sucked into Hadouken’s super-catchy chorus:
Didn’t realize the whole purpose of the video was to market a song called “Levitate”? This is what we internet folks call “content marketing”…essentially web content that is so useful people would theoretically pay for it.
So how was it possible for the band to use all this footage from a rights perspective? Based on the number of attribution links to the original video sources as well as YouTube’s strict “3 strikes you’re out” policy, this author is assuming the band either took the time to obtain permission from all the rights holders…or carefully chose content created only by rights holders participating in YouTube’s revenue sharing program (perhaps a combination of both).
Copyright permissions are a serious business on YouTube because of their “copyright strike” policy. If a user’s account has had content removed three times based on “complete and valid removal requests from copyright holders”, then that user’s account will be suspended for 6 months.
I think this is brilliant marketing on Hadouken’s part. Their video strategy accumulated 75M+ YouTube views and went viral in at least one Atlanta elementary school. Well done, mates.
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Mike Bielenberg is a professional musician and co-founder of http://www.musicrevolution.com, a production music marketplace with over 23,000 tracks online where media producers, video producers, filmmakers, game developers, businesses and other music buyers can license high-quality, affordable royalty-free music from an online community of musicians mbielenberg@musicrevolution.com.
