It's Not Easy Being Wierd

This month's Wired Magazine has a great article about the career of Weird Al Yankovic - the song parody artist best known to my generation for Fat (1988 spoof of Michael Jackson's Bad) and Amish Paradise (1996 spoof of Coolio's Gansta's Paradise.)  The most interesting part of the article was the discussion of how Yankovic has had to adopt his career in the face of music's long tail and Web 2.0. 

Weird Al built his career parodying "mega-artists who had distinctive musical and visual styles that he could exaggerate for effect."  MTV (back when they actually played videos) reinforced Weird Al's career by acting as a "national radio station" dictating Top 40 tunes, and serving up videos which viewers would literally memorize.  Fast forward 20 years: MTV has devolved into a station apparently void of music and iTunes and satellite/internet radio have allowed for intense fragmentation and personalization of the music space.   Weird Al faces an uphill battle to simply identify and develop relevant content.

A second challenge Weird Al faces is the rise of YouTube.  Unlike Weird Al, who spends months developing his parodies, any randar with a video camera can now create their own spoof overnight.  Suddenly, we can all be Weird Al in a fraction of the time it takes Al to be Weird.

I'd love to see Weird Al tackle some of these challenges head on by using social media to assert his ownership of the musical parody space, and stay connected to fans.  Two ideas I had:

• Be the Godfather of YouTube Parodies - Weird Al has an immensely popular YouTube channel, with more than 40k subscribers. Why not use it to run monthly contests for amateur parody artists?  Prizing could be anything from a video of Weird Al "endorsing" the parody, to appearing in an upcoming Weird Al video.  Weird Al should leverage this new generation of imitators to reinforce his own image as the king of parody.

• Stay Relevant Through Co-Creation -Staying relevant and interacting with fans between albums could be accomplished by involving fans in the creation of a new song.  Weird Al could use part of his website to create interactive Digg-style voting on the Top 40 charts, allowing fans to vote up or down songs they think he should parody on his next album.  Winning song gets parodied by Al.  (There are lots of variations on the co-creation theme that could be exciting...)

How else could Weird Al use social media as he continues to adapt his 25 year career?

Comments

[El Gaffney]

so glad my love of weird al led me here. great post. i especially like your second idea of involving fans in choosing his next song parody. i think if he tries to position himself as the king of youtube parodies, it would feel forced. he's got the history with this form but the best know they don't need to go through him. they're possibly better off avoiding that move. don't want him to feel like hammer with dancejam. at least he'd be staying where the people/parodiers (new word) are rather than trying to create a new community for this interest.

[oe]

Believe me, when it comes to staying connected to fans, Weird Al is all over that one. He has over 614,000 MySpace friends, and he maintains the page himself. He puts up our fan art and links to our fan videos of his songs on weirdal.com. Many of the extras in his mega-hit White & Nerdy video were fans, recruited through a MySpace casting call. They had a wonderful time at the video shoot. And when he's on a concert tour, he does a lot of meeting and greeting, always gracious, friendly and attentive. And he REMEMBERS quite a few of us after we've turned up in several of those autograph lines. I doubt very much that Al will ever let fans get involved with any part of his actual creative process (except for the "extras" thing) for fear of opening himself up to the "you stole my idea" lawsuits, but I do expect that he will continue to maintain the closest possible ties to his fanbase, and we'll continue trooping round to his concerts and buying his stuff and just generally loving and respecting him, almost as much as he deserves.