Career Advancement through Viral Music Videos

In discussing viral music videos, one must address first and foremost the "rick roll," that is, the music video of Rick Astley singing his number one hit "Never Gonna Give You Up." The act of "rick rolling" someone consisted of sending a link that was purportedly for something unrelated, and was in fact a link to the video, seen below.

 

The video made Astley one of the world's best recognized musical artists, 20 years after the song first hit number one on the charts.  (http://www.rickastley.co.uk/)  What makes this phenomenon so interesting is that it occurred without any prompting from Astley.  In fact, his one time participating in a "rick roll," at the 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, is seen by some as the death of this internet meme.  Intentional or not, however, the rick rolling phenomenon is seen by many as having revived his career as a musician.  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3534073/Macys-Thanksgiving-Day-parade-Rick-Astley-performs-his-own-Rickroll.html)

By contrast, the musical group The Lonely Island seems intent on producing a string of viral videos.  With videos such as "I'm On a Boat" and "Like a Boss," to list some of the more mild examples, they create incredibly amusing, if vulgar music videos, usually to satirize trends in music videos or popular culture.  They are so popular, in fact, that the top six videos on their YouTube channel each have over 50 million views (http://www.youtube.com/user/thelonelyisland/videos?sort=p&view=0 Warning: Most of these videos contain content that is quite vulgar, crude, and minimally, not safe for work.)  One might hypothesize, as The Lonely Island's Andy Samberg does (albeit rather colorfully), that one of the reasons for the success of their videos is the shock value that comes from that very crudeness.  (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_samberg_qa/all/1)  With that success, he explains, does come the ability to make money off of the YouTube videos, although licensing can be problematic at times, since many of The Lonely Island's videos first appear on Saturday Night Live.

Interestingly, at times, viral videos can be sufficiently popular that they will start or be referenced in other, usually image-based memes.  A few examples relating to the above-mentioned viral videos follow.  In the first example, we see the rick roll referenced in the so-called demotivational poster meme, while  in the third example, the reference to the "On a Boat" video is combined with the "Most Interesting Man in the World" image-meme based on the Dos Equis beer commercials.

http://www.empirestategamer.com/rock-band-dlc-for-week-of-2-14-2012/

http://weknowmemes.com/2011/12/close-up-like-a-boss/

http://www.irishstu.com/stublog/2011/07/01/nerds-on-a-boat/

Though we may find them to be silly, viral music videos can jump-start, or restart the careers of the artists involved in them, and they can become such significant parts of our culture, that other viral phenomena may spin off from, or tie into them.