Brittany Bardo
Prof. Guntram Werther
Integrative Business Applications
3/19/15

Critical Analysis #3: The Internet Should Have Killed Weird Al If you examine the pop charts from 30 years ago, it is hard to identify many artists who’ve managed to stay relevant into today’s generation. Weird Al, is one artist that has been active in the music industry since the mid 1970’s and has been able to keep up with the times way before the dawn of social media, online media, and vlogging. For his most recent album, Weird Al designed a creative advertising strategy for the digital age with his #8videos8days experiment. This strategy included eight videos in eight days for eight songs from the new album — on a variety of sites ranging from
Partnerships with diverse websites allow the publishers to gain traffic and ad revenue while Weird Al receives more exposure and sales. Weird Al also can benefit from additional exposure by continuing to feature special guests in his videos. He could endure this strategy with trendy, high-profile celebrities that will share his content with their own audiences—maximizing his exposure to different audiences. With any successful celebrity or musician, there are also possible threats that they face. With Weird Al’s long term and recent success, it would not be surprising if upcoming amateur artists follow his ideas and strategies. There are also a lot of amateur parodists in the industry that he is going to have to compete very closely with now that his focus is on social media—where many amateur parodists have originated their careers. Amateur YouTube artists are certainly not going to be easy to compete with when trying to gain the younger audiences interest. For example, Bart Baker, who is considered “YouTube’s Parody King”, is a parody artist that shoots great quality videos that also takes place on sets that look just like the original videos. Similar to Weird Al, Baker parodies popular hit songs and features many trending YouTube guest stars in his videos. With more than a million subscribers and nearly 500 million views on just his YouTube