Travis Crowe's Blog

Youtube has been hit by yet another viral teen video, however this particular video isn’t famous because of its quality… its more so famous for its lack their of.  The music video “Friday” starring 13-year old Anaheim native Rebecca Black was released on youtube on Friday, February 11th as her first ever attempt at recording a single, and it shows. Asides from the song being terrible, as demonstrated by lyrics such as “yesterday was Thursday, today is Friday, tomorrow is Saturday, and Sunday comes afterwards” and “Kickin’ in the front seat, sittin’ in the back seat, gotta make my mind up which seat can I take?”, her voice is clearly not up to recording artist standard, as the song producers have auto-tuned practically every line she sings. So with that being said, how did Rebecca Black even get a single in the first place? Money. Black’s family paid the producing company Ark Music Factory (AMF) to make her daughter a single. AMF specializes in writing songs for young girls who don’t have material for themselves, and then they record the single for them, including producing a music video, promising instant stardom.

As stated above, this video premiered way back in February…so how come it is only going viral now? Simple. Black can thank publicity from social networks and word of mouth for her instant fame. Comedian Michael Jensen first tweeted about the video on March 11th, which ignited a chain of re-tweets, as well as facebook posts and shares. Additionally, Black’s song was mentioned in widely read music magazine Billboard Magazine, which has also contributed to her instant fame. Within 1 day the  number of viewers who had watched the video skyrocketed from below 400,000 to over 1.2 million, and now just 5 days later has reached an astounding  9.56 million views.

This is all just an evident example of how social media can be used in our generation to promote anything, and how large of an effect it has on the acceptance or rejection of a product, or in this case a song. As soon as people saw the hateful comments, and numerous jokes made about Black’s song, she became an instant laughing stock practically over night. If companies were able to use this technique to their advantage however, they could benefit tremendously. For example, if a company were to make a parody video surrounding one of their new products, all if would take would be a few twitter mentions and facebook posts to instantly create a huge amount of word of mouth surrounding their product, and if executed properly, a huge amount of interest for their product as well.