You Tube, Fenomena ‘Mesin’ Pencari Bakat Terbaru dalam Industri Musik Modern
Being beady in finding talents and runs an effective marketing strategy to deal with promotion within the music industry scene anywhere in the world, are important and essential steps to actors and figures in it, in order to grab incomes as well as reach climax of popularity.
No wonder, if in particular project, music producers are dare to spend promotion cost that is far more excessive than production cost. Such bravery of producers certainly based on matured considerations in talent scouting, marketing and assessing creativity which is developed by a team of production and consistently monitoring market needs. In order to round off the mentioned concern, usually, producers will be assisted by his/ her Talent Scout expert and Marketing Manager, whom are demanded to observe constantly the development of the market trend in global music, which in turn, shall deploy facilities of electronic, printed and off-air media as tools to introduce their artists to the public at large.
As a result, in the era of the beginning of modern music development, roles of a Talent Scout and Marketing Manager shall be vital in determining artist to be produced by certain recording label. From time to time, at certain label, talents scout and marketing manager are seemed more important to “approach” by artist candidates, for the sake of boosting their career, instead of the position of producer itself.
However, as the “industrial” music comes into post-millennium era, where internet “epidemic” rapidly contaminated the world, roles of talent scout and marketing manager are seemingly just waiting for their time to be completely “disappeared” after in February 2005, three former employees of internet-based payment service company, PAYPAL, who located at California USA, i.e. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim “shake” the world by their invention of video publication site, which has been widely known as YouTube.
From their headquarter at 901 Cherry Ave, San Bruno, California, USA, Chad, Steve and Jawed designed their innovation as a “practical” means enabling users of internet to share visions of video recording of other users anywhere by free through the site www.youtube.com. The site can also conduct an accurate data collection system (show video statistic), to compute how many viewers had watched particular video, after it is uploaded. It means the video makers or producers may not require anymore the use of average calculation technique on number of viewers. From that point, producers may easily carry on further step of marketing strategy on the basis of the amount of viewers, which is displayed on the website page. In addition, anybody could be a talent-scout by just clicking www.youtube.com and then chose the latest video category of the up-loaders. The Ontario, Canadian teen singer, Justine Bieber successfully reaches global popularity as well as grabs huge financial incomes after his video was uploaded in You Tube. However, it has been also people made just for kicks, just like a French man, Remi Gaillard, who finally becomes famed figure after he taped and disseminated his “exaggerated” raillery video through You Tube.
There are still multitudinous of “instant” artists candidates, who intentionally or unintentionally lain deploy YouTube as their “narcissism” tool, but probably profitable. In our nation, efficiency of YouTube as a free and wide-reaching marketing and promotional tool has been proved by few people. Such as two Bandung-based students, Sinta and Jojo, who abruptly became famed figures after they uploaded their video of lip-sync, the dangdut song, “Keong Racun”. Moreover, there was an act of singing Indian pop in lip-sync, “Chaiyya Chaiyya”, by an Indonesian policeman, Officer Norman Kamaru, whose his act was taped through his friend’s cell-phone camera and danced a la Bollywood’s Shahrukh Khan. By which, the action has been powerful enough attracting various responses and reactions from public at large. And the most ridiculous one was how somebody’s act—he named himself as Udin Sedunia—expressed his act through video and then it was uploaded in YouTube.
The question is now; as common people, how far it will be that we do a quality control upon such videos, so they can be deservedly assumed as an entertainment media, which complies with common ethics?
To be honest, our public is still disregarding ethics in accepting certain entertainment broadcasting from internet. Since in fact, as long as they like one video, quality and ethics have been the trivial factors to be considered.
Funny, interesting and entertaining are quite enough to assume certain video is good and acceptable for the people at large in this country. In my opinion, those would become a “boomerang” for the quality development of artworks in Indonesia. That means, although YouTube, at certain point, has been a media that enables artists—or whoever it would be—to promote their artworks easily and free-of-charge, most of our people are still vulnerable in quality assessment aspect, as they prefer “sensational” views instead of “achievement”.
Up to the date, however, operators of You Tube have been censoring any video displays, which had violated common morality. But don’t forget, morality principles cannot exceed vision of considerations of the world’s people, as an individual, and it is naturally very relative. For instance, the clip video of American famed singer, Lady Gaga. Who would dare to declare that her video does not violate morality principles? However, there have been individuals who dare to say that the music quality of the New York-born artist is categorized as “awful” (below standard).
So, the point is how we shall educate our mental through a positive vision upon any video displays we have been viewing sporadically through internet. Afterwards, we must dare to eliminate any form of dissemination of any graphics that are beyond ethics and morality restrictions, in accordance with our noble culture.
Are we ready yet?
*Budi Abuy (former vocalist of Time Bomb Blues, Senior Editor of The Flag Magazine)
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