RadioHead's Animation Contest: One Step Closer to Broadly Popular User-Generated Content
March 18 2008 / by Alvis Brigis
Category: Social Media Year: 2008 Rating: 12
Platinum rock group Radiohead yesterday announced that a user-submitted animation contest will determine the contents of it’s latest music video. The competition is being held in conjunction with AniBoom, a YouTube site for animators. The winning video(s) will be chosen by Radiohead, AniBoom and the AniBoom community.
This will result in an enormous amount of instant exposure for the winning animations and marks a big step in the ongoing march toward more widely consumed user-generated content (UGC). The contest will also probably net a better video than Radiohead could have produced on their own. After all, how can one band with a single vision out-compete 10,000 submissions all processed by the band and the masses alike? Sure, Radiohead could pay a bundle for cutting-edge production quality, but that still wouldn’t guarantee a viral, broadly enjoyable video.
Overall, it’s great to see Radiohead both acting in a progressive manner and making smart business decisions. Getting fans involved is a win-win for all, except perhaps established music-video production companies, and demonstrating a positive-sum business model is good for everyone. A successful contest that nets a popular video will no-doubt spur other groups and companies to launch their own UGC contests and continue to shift the power to the masses. Hopefully it will catch on just as the recent user-submitted political campaign videos phenomenon.
If this trend continues, what percent of all major-label music videos do you think will be made up of UGC just 5 years from now?
