It's been little more than a month since Oren Lavie uploaded his virally successful YouTube video,Her Morning Elegance. Since then, it's been viewed around 3.7 million times ( as of this morning February 23, 2009)
While the reaction to the video is often, "It's So Beautiful," and "How Did They Do That?", the real purpose of the video is all business: Lavie is another example of how social media is changing how the business of music is conducted in the United States.
According to the 2008 Digital Music Survey,
"Video has long been crucial to music marketing. But the rise of social media means that it’s YouTube, not MTV, which is where this is being played out. For 41% of consumers now say YouTube is the single most important community site in terms of music. It’s a 14% jump on last year that has been gained directly at the expense of MySpace."
Lavie didn't have a contract with a record label so he created his own, A Quarter Past Wonderful,which he used to self-produce his album The Opposite Side of The Sea.
Lavie didn't have a marketing department to promote the music, so he created a MySpace Page which houses the video linked to YouTube.
Lavie released his album on iTunes in 2008 - as of this writing there is still not a physical version of the album and of course he released the video on YouTube.
A simple formula that has been followed by many independent artists. What makes this one different? Lavie is extremely accomplished -- in addition to being a singer/songwriter he is also a playwright and a director.From his blog on MySpace,
Right now the only place to "buy" this album is on iTunes. Lavie is in the process of negotiating a physical release of the music.
Wondering how they did it? From Lavie's MySpace page.
* The video was shot all stills - roughly 3225 still photos for the entire video, using one camera, hanging from the ceiling for the main body of the movie.
* It took 4 weeks before shooting to create an animated computer generated storyboard for the video, with 3d dummies for the characters.
* It took only 2 days of shooting for the live actors on set to re-create the 3.5 minutes computer sequence, frame by frame.
* Some of the bed sheets used in the video were taken from Oren’s own bedroom and are now considered collectors items, worth at the moment not very much and therefore used as bed sheets.
*Each of the wonderfully talented people above have worked on the video for a fraction of their normal rates (except Oren who worked for his normal rate of zero).
To learn more about the people in video, Visit Lavie's MySpace page
My StumbleUpon Page
