My addiction to YouTube

UPDATED | March 8, 2006

This post about sharing Gil Scott-Heron videos on YouTube has nothing to do with marketing. Wait. It has EVERYTHING to do with marketing since it falls into the consumer generated|consumer empowerment marketing game.

I’ve become addicted to YouTube. Some of you may know I’m a music junkie who is always in need of funk fix. Yeah, my music roots are deep into funk, funky jazz, jazzy funk, and straight-up jazz. And on YouTube, I am finding so many cool videos of rarely seen live sets, music videos, and commercials from some of my favorite music groups.

For example, here’s a TV commercial for Parliament's "Funkentelechy vs. The Placebo Syndrome" album. And here’s a great live version of “Hollywood (Africa)” from the Red Hot Chili Peppers with George Clinton back when the RHCP were cool and funky. Ain't nothing funkier than Herbie Hancock & The Headhunters playing Chameleon from 1974. As a hip-hop-storian, I was shocked to find rare Grandmaster Melle Mel videos such as this Public Service Announcement and this Spike Lee directed video for White Lines.

There is so much cool stuff to find on YouTube and it is only going to get better as more people upload videos to it. (Reminds me of when Napster was just starting out and I was a huge Napster junkie back in the day.)

What’s a funky marketer like me to do who preaches the cluetrain? Easy answer … join the conversation and loosely join some of my small pieces. So after noticing there were no videos of Gil Scott-Heron, my favorite musician, I added to the YouTube collective by sharing some videos of Gil Scott-Heron. (Who’s Gil Scott-Heron? Let wikipedia tell you.)

Gil Scott-Heron performing JOHANNESBURG...
video snippet has been deleted by YouTube because the video infringes upon the copyright owner

Gil Scott-Heron performing A LOVELY DAY...
video snippet has been deleted by YouTube because the video infringes upon the copyright owner

For more … check out the Church of the Customer’s take on why NBC is “shooting itself in its viral foot” by restricting the online distribution of its content and why YouTube is better than Google Video.

Comments

[Benedikt]

Thank you very much for those great GSH-videos!

[DK]

fantastic finds - thanks for uploading and sharing - one of my favourite artists of all time :-)

[sm]

Thanks for sharing, youtube is great, but I had not seen these.

[b geppert]

Ever heard of a cd called: "Movements: 14 Deep Funk Pearls" (perfect.toy records) - compiled by this German DJ named Tobias Kirmayer. It's got some killer funk that somehow got lost in time but alas, now it has been found!