You’d think that “Weird Al” Yankovic would be so last decade.
Or maybe it’s the decade before. Weird Al began his weird career way back in the late 1970s, after all—long before every comedian with a camera phone could post their latest satirical song on YouTube.
But even as tech-savvy teeny bops were in the process of collectively asking “Weird what, now?” old Al transformed himself into the king of new media and took their breath away. In fact, even though Weird Al started back in a day and age when people would have stared blankly at the mention of something called a “Face … book,” today’s content providers probably oughta line up and take some lessons from this genius guy with the goofy grin.
Ok, so here’s how it all went down.
After several decades of taking popular pop songs and parodying them with witty, sometimes scathing, lyrics full of popular culture zigs and chuckles, the Weird man was set to put out his 14th album called Mandatory Fun. But there was a problem. Nobody wanted to pay for the videos. A lot of the audience draw and sales momentum for Weird Al’s albums traditionally came from his equally bright and quirky videos that he’d release in connection with his albums on outlets such as MTV. This time, though, the studio looked at the costs for that kind of extra press and the waning MTV audience and said, “No mas.”
“Well there’s no music television per se anymore” Weird Al said in a Fox News interview. “MTV still exists but it’s not really music television. The Internet, for my purposes at least, is the new MTV.”
Since there wasn’t any budget for videos, Al decided to get the Internet to pay for them. He went directly to sites such as The Nerdist, Yahoo!Screen, College Humor, Pop Crush, Funny or Die, and even The Wall Street Journal and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse: They would pay for the videos in exchange for a premiere on their site and exclusive content. Add that up with hip vids featuring guest appearances from the likes of Jack Black, Eric Stonestreet, Margaret Cho, Kristen Schaal and Aisha Tyler, and you get a sudden surge of attention that Al then spread that out over eight days, with eight separate video premieres.
“The Internet is very quick, it’s very ephemeral, it’s of the moment, things go viral and people talk about things for a day basically,” Al opined to Fox. “It’s a 24-hour period where people ingest it and then move on to something else. So I figured I really wanted release week to be a big deal, to be an event, and I thought if I did eight videos and just have a new video every single day I think that would make an impact because people would be talking about the album all week long.”
The sponsor sites got traffic and ad revenue, Al got the exposure and the rest was kismet. The three-time Grammy-winner landed atop the Billboard album charts for the first time in his 35-year run. It was his best first week sales ever and it made his 14th record the first comedy album to hit number one in 50 years.
Which all boils down to the fact that Alfred Matthew Yankovic is likely having a lot of mandatory fun these days. But it’s gonna be tough for anybody to say he’s all that weird after this.
Recent Comments