Today, music video site Vevo and S-Curve Records are teaming up to introduce a new artist via a very cool piece of technology: a choose-your-own adventure music video.
Andy Grammer’s new video (created by interactive video technology company Interlude) for his song “Keep Your Head Up” is a first for Vevo — basically, fans can click on the video itself to seamlessly change the outcome of the action. We’ve seen choose-your-own-adventure vids before, but usually they involve a series of linked videos. This iteration is a lot smoother, thanks to Interlude’s expertise; apparently it is also the first of its scale that the company has created stateside.
And, bonus, a lot of possible outcomes feature a cameo by Rainn Wilson from The Office.
Starting today, you can head on over to Vevo — where the vid has premiered exclusively — and play around with the video, creating hundreds of possible storylines. The most popular storyline as determined by fans will premiere on Vevo, including VEVO.com, VEVO Mobile, VEVO on YouTube and Vevo syndication sites on November 15.
In our opinion, this is a genius way to get fans hip to a new artist. Draw them in with an interesting concept, get them listening to a song over and over again as they play around with the vid, and, hopefully, turn them into Andy Grammer fans.
As for the song itself, Grammer tells us: “I wrote it for myself, because I was a street performer originally for about two or three years in Santa Monica. And one day I came home and sat down at my piano and tried to cheer myself up after a slow day of CD sales on the street. We decided that this video would be really cool if anything that you chose would put me in a tough situation, and regardless of that situation I would still have a smiling face.”
As a former street performer, Grammer understands how hard it is to grow an audience, but he sees this video as a major opportunity for building a fan base. Although he’s performed on hundreds of college campuses, Grammar is still a newer artist, and this is his first video.
“People would be walking by on the street or they would be having coffee and I would sit next to them and assault them with my music,” he says. “So now to have a video, that’s kind of doing that work for me.”
Of course, the gimmick alone will not be enough to win people over — Grammer’s music will ultimately have to have staying power of its own.
Check out the video on Vevo (it was too big for us to embed here), and let us know in the comments: What do you think of using dynamic social media efforts to introduce an up-and-coming act?
Image courtesy of Evan Wexler
Reviews: YouTube
More About: interlude, music, pop culture, vevo, viral video
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