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?
To get an idea of what this might mean for us in the future, we’ve only got to look at the best example of UGC around today: YouTube.
Blogging was great, but there appears to be far more power in a video than a long winded piece of text. Home made internet radio is pretty popular, but sadly not to the extent it could be. For this I blame the lack of microphones as standard on modern PCs. YouTube has allowed people to present themselves and their opinions in a way far more effective than has ever been seen before.
Who knows how this could evolve. Anyone can create relatively high production values given the right software. As it becomes easier to edit, present, manipulate, and even research content, more and more possibilities open themselves up to amateur creators. Professionally created material that amateurs could use in their own content, such as blue screen backgrounds, soundtracks, or special effects, could become a respectable market in a few years.
Perhaps User Created interactive experiences could have even more impact. Tools could be written allowing radical and user friendly customisation of game engines. Spore has already started to embark on this fascinating path.
Chris Kohler at Wired claims
that “Spore’s going to massive.” Considering creator
Will Wright’s spectacular track record with The Sims and
the buzz that has already surrounded this game for 2 years, that’s
a safe bet.
More interesting is why this game could be huge.
Chris is the first more-or-less mainstream media reporter I’ve
read that absolutely grocks the deep content potential contained in
Spore and, more specifically, the game’s ground-breaking
Creature Creator, a feature that will permit people ages
4-to-99 to super-easily generate their very own Spore
characters.
The user generated content (UGC) at the heart of the experience
and model could change the way that a lot of companies do business
and tweak a generation-wide view of games and the economy.
If Spore proves even a moderate hit then millions will
use its Creature Creator to create tens of millions of totally
original cute, hilarious, and terrifying little alien life forms.
These aliens will not just auto-populate the Spore MMO
universe, resulting in unprecedented in-game diversity (almost
instantly eclipsing the sheer scale of Second Life UGC), they’ll
also quickly escape into the wider world in the form of trading
cards, plastic action figures and a variety of to-be-determined
formats.
Than again, if my little cousin, who’s had a prototype image of
a zebra-frog that he plans to insert into Spore prepped
for well over a year, is any indicator, then come September we may
witness the most rapid viral content campaign in human history,
perhaps resulting in the biggest game of all-time.
Creature Creator, a feature that will permit people ages
4-to-99 to super-easily generate their very own Spore
characters. 