Image
It all started with Star Wars.
In the spring of 2009, Octarium, a professional ensemble in Kansas City, gave a performance of “Star Wars - John Williams Is the Man”—an arrangement by the a cappella group Moosebutter of famous lines from the Star Wars Trilogy set to music from the film scores of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "Superman," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Jaws," "E.T.," and "Jurassic Park." Octarium's artistic director Krista Blackwood had it videotaped, added in some short clips from the movie, and send it to her singers as a gift.
They loved it and one of the singers posted the video on YouTube. “The picture quality wasn’t that great and neither was the audio,” Blackwood says, but the video got more views than anyone expected. Encouraged by the marketing possibilities, Blackwood created a free YouTube page for Octarium and posted videos from their Christmas concert. Hundreds clicked to hear perennial holiday favorites “The Wexford Carol,” “The First Noel,” and “What Child Is This?”
Then one Thursday late in 2010, Blackwood was messing around with an online program called Xtranormal that allows you to put the script of a conversation into the mouths of cute, round animated characters. An hour later out came "Explaining an Arts NonProfit," a tongue-in-cheek video, that shows, as one reviewer put it, “the disjunction between the non-profit arts funding model and the general public's understanding of the economics involved in creating non-commercial art in this country.”
“Again, I meant it for my singers,” says Blackwood, “but then one of my board members sent it off to Thomas Cott, who has a blog about arts and culture. Then Alex Ross, the New Yorker arts reviewer, picked up on it and put it on his blog.”
At last count, the video had been viewed 76,000 times and had plugged Blackwood and Octarium into an important discussion about nonprofit arts funding. “It kind of went crazy,” Blackwood says of the video, “and what it also did was lead people to our YouTube site. Not only was that video taking off, everything else we had on the site was taking off, too. It really highlighted for me that people can find what we do on a video page a lot easier than they can find it anywhere else.”
Octarium is one of a growing number of choruses that have entered the exciting and unpredictable world of video marketing. They’re not only posting video of concerts but also letting their imaginations run wild, creating memorable videos that teach, tantalize, and tickle the funny bone. For some the use of video is changing how they use their marketing dollars, making a difference in their public image, and even increasing their ticket sales.
Just for the Fun of It
Like Octarium’s “Explaining an Arts Nonprofit,” some chorus videos start as a lark and take off from there. Last year Missy Clarkson, a soprano and a board member with the Vancouver Cantata Singers, convinced her ensemble to do a video called “Sh*t Choristers Say,” a take off on the slew of other videos poking fun at everyone from surgeons to lawyers to orchestra conductors.
Clarkson cast herself in the lead as the annoying chorister who asks way too many questions and makes way too many excuses, and during rehearsal one night, shot the video using an iPad. An almost instant sensation on YouTube, the video had 100,000 views after three days and as of January of 2012 had been watched some 245,000 times. Among the nearly 350 comments were many like this one: “SOOOOOO TRUE. OMG, I SAY THIS STUFF ALL THE TIME!”
There also was instant recognition when Adam Adler showed the video to his Near North Voices, a university-community choir in North Bay, Ontario. “We saw and heard so many of the things we encounter in rehearsals reflected back with great humor,” Adler reported in an email. “Some of the catch phrases from the video have actually become an active part of our choir’s culture. The line 'he needs to work on his passagio' has become distilled to just the ‘waving at the front of the throat’ gesture, which I regularly use to remind my tenors that they are forcing themselves flat through that area.”
There was no grand scheme behind the video, except perhaps to “put a sheen on a very straight-laced choral ensemble,” Dave Carlin, Vancouver Cantata Singers’ general manager, says. Over the past few years, the group has tiptoed into social media—posting videos of songs from concerts and sending links through Facebook and Twitter. But “Sh*t Choristers Say” was a departure—and a risk. And it was remarkably simple. “The moment we thought of it to the moment it was released was two and a half days,” Clarkson says. “And it was absolutely free.”
Carlin knew something important had happened for the organization when after a Vancouver Cantata Singers performance at the ACDA convention in Seattle in March of 2012, Clarkson was mobbed by some 50 young singers who had seen “Sh*t Choristers Say” and wanted her autograph. “I think that video has really changed public perception of what Vancouver Cantata Singers is,” Carlin says.
The response to the video has also changed his organization’s approach to marketing, Carlin says. “We think of all of our performances now as opportunities to capture content,” he says. “We are increasingly using social media to maintain relationships with even our oldest patrons. So live recordings of events or dress rehearsals or interviews with artists who are going to perform with us or a conversation with a pianist about a vintage fortepiano that was being used in an upcoming concert —all are really important factors in us selling our concerts.” See examples on the Vancouver Cantata Singers YouTube page.
Carlin believes the way video reaches out into a broader world may make a difference to funders too. “Funders can see what Vancouver Cantata Singers has done or tries to do,” he says, “and the number of people it can reach now. We have become imminently more fundable because we have done something different, and it has worked.”
Turning the Traditional Christmas Video on Its Head
Over the past few years, the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir has devoted a slice of its marketing budget to fun and engaging videos. In May of 2011 the Choir’s flash mob rendition of “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana filmed at the Indianapolis Airport reached 30,000 views in one month (as of January 2013 it was nearly 70,000).
In 2012, the Choir produced “The Carolers,” a humorous invitation to their Christmas concerts. We won’t give away the punchline…view it here. The video got a couple thousand views—not as many as the flash mob—but Michael Pettry, executive director, believes that the video helped sell out their concerts and reached people that the typical postcard mailer would not.
“We spent about $1,500 total on it,” Pettry says, “including paying actors and film crew and editing. That’s what we might spend for one print ad. You’re basically taking the weakest 10 percent of your marketing budget and reinvesting it. I would say doing these kinds of videos is worth every penny.”
The Choir also takes pains to manage their brand. Pettry says paying a crew, rather than using a handheld camera, insures that the video “is at the same level as our artistic product.” The Choir also offers a “social media 101” workshop for Choir members so there is some consistency in how singers promote the Choir on their own Facebook pages and websites. “For example, using the acronym ISC doesn’t necessarily communicate,” Pettry says. “We ask folks to spell it out.”
Another important part of their strategy is to make sure every video they post is linked to more content and information about the Choir. It’s simply good business, he says. “Budgets are so limited,” he says, “especially for the arts. And people are so bombarded with visuals. You have to think, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then how much is a video worth? Much more, I think.”
Hitting the Big Time
If you want to have a little fun with your old college musician friends, why not make a video? That’s what Colin Britt and Arianne Abela had in mind when they arranged a choral-orchestral parody of “Call Me Maybe,” the ubiquitous pop hit from last summer. Both Yale grads, Britt and Abela gathered 60 of their Yale-affiliated friends on the Yale campus over the Labor Day weekend in 2012. “We actually kept it a surprise and didn’t tell them what the song was,” Britt says. When they arrived, the group had two hours to rehearse and record the song.
“It was ultra-low budget in every possible way,” Britt says. To capture video, the group used four video cameras, including two iPhones. A friend set up a digital audio recorder between the orchestra and the chorus. Abela’s sister, a film major in California, edited video footage of the group, which members named the 3Penny Chorus and Orchestra, and the video went live on YouTube about a week after Labor Day.
And that’s when the real fun began. By the next morning, “Call Me Maybe” had tens of thousands of views (by the end of January 2013, the number was at nearly 2.5 million). Then the Today show called asking the group to perform the piece on the program. “That was definitely a pinch yourself moment,” Britt says. “We had two days to get 60 people to New York. That was a lot of fun.”
Going viral in such a big way gave the 3Penny Chorus and Orchestra an unexpected platform to raise awareness about choral music, Britt says. “Some people wrote us saying, ‘I never liked choral music and this video made me see it in a different way because it was something I could identify with it as a way of looking at choirs and orchestras that I had never seen before.’ That is a possibility of something like this. It makes it more accessible to those who would not go to a concert or who feel alienated or distant from classical music.”
Don’t count on your chorus video going viral, Britt cautions. 3Penny's next video of an arrangement of Bob Geldof’s "Do They Know It's Christmas", produced to raise money for Action Against Hunger, topped out at a few thousand views. But number of views is not really the point anyway, Britt says.
"We have learned, and are still learning, that the power of group initiative is really strong," Britt says."If you go into it with the right mindset to do something fun, then it's worth it. That's what it was about for us, all the way through to standing in Rockefeller Plaza at 6 am waiting to go on television. It was just such a wonderful sense of community, and that is all we really wanted from it."
Ready to Get Started?
Consider these "words to the wise" from your chorus friends.
Today’s technology makes videotaping simple and inexpensive. Several of Octarium’s most popular videos were shot with handheld Flip cameras, Blackwood says. 3Penny Chorus and Orchestra drew footage for “Call Me Maybe” from four video cameras, including two iPhones. Vancouver Cantata Singers used Clarkson’s iPad to film “Sh*t Choristers Say,” and she used iMovie to edit the footage."It's remarkably inexpensive," Britt says.
Even higher quality video need not be expensive. Clarkson said Vancouver Cantata Singers has borrowed high-quality video cameras from universities attended by its members. Blackwood paid a group of students from a local community college $300 to videotape Octarium’s 2012 Christmas concert. The crew placed four mics in front of the singers and two behind to capture audio that would not have been as clear using just video cameras. “You don’t want people to make a snap judgment about the sound of your group based on a video,” she said.
Make sure you label your videos. You can use a handheld camera but be sure the video has a beginning and end that identifies your group or performance, which you can add when you edit. “People should know what they are about to hear,” Blackwood said. “Online editing programs will walk you right through how to do that.”
Use “tags” to increase the reach of a video. “On YouTube you can tag with words like choir, chorus, funny, live, recorded, etc.,” Clarkson said. “So tag as many words as you can to describe your video. Then if anyone searches one of those words, it comes up in search engines.”
It doesn’t even have to be actual live video footage. Blackwood took studio audio of several Octarium performances and, using the iMovie program, added still photography to create a slideshow. “It was easy,” she says. “You just drag things around and cut and paste and you’ve got a beautiful video.” Here is an example: “Sing Me to Heaven”. Blackwood has plans to use the same system over the coming months to release songs from Octarium's four CDs.
Keep up to date on licensing rights. In order to post music videos on YouTube, you need the permission of the song’s publisher or a “mechanical license,” according to the Harry Fox Agency, which handles rights for musicians. You do not need a mechanical license if you are recording and distributing a song you wrote yourself, or if the song is in the public domain.
But with the explosion of online content, the rules are murky. “It’s a digital jungle out there,” Blackwood says. “The legal advice I have gotten is that since I have purchased both digital and mechanical rights I probably haven’t used all of them so that gives me some leeway to post these things for free on YouTube. But that’s something that is not going to be definitively answered for a long time.” Her advice: check back often to see if the rules have changed.
Realize that you can’t control the responses to your video. “With the anonymity of the Internet, people tend to be jerkier than they might be in person,” Clarkson. After some particularly snarky comments about “Sh*t Choristers Say,” Vancouver Cantata Singers decided to use the YouTube option that allows you to approve comments before they are posted. “I wouldn’t filter out all of the negative comments,” Clarkson said, “because that becomes a farce. But I do think it is important to manage your brand.”
“Call Me Maybe” got its share of rude comments, too, which its creators concluded is just the price of being popular. “The more a video goes out into the world the more likely it will stir up snarky, rude comments,” Colin said. “You have to have a thick skin.”
Look out for pirates. On one occasion, Octarium’s posted music was “claimed” by a sham organization that began to market it as its own. When Blackwood discovered the heist, she put a stop to it, but she's philosophical about the experience. “We realize that people can steal our music, but I figure if they want it that bad to steal it, they can have it. We don’t do this for the money. We do this to spread the gospel and the joy and the importance of choral music.”
Connect your video offerings to your larger social media presence. Use email blasts, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to get your videos out there. And make sure there are links where viewers can find more information and content from your chorus.
Remember, it’s just another tool. “But it is a tool that a whole generation of people are used to,” Carlin says. “It is how people want to be reached now.”
Just do it! “Think of every performance as a way to create content,” Carlin says. “People will not respond to everything. But given that it costs you practically nothing, you can do it and very quickly figure out what works and what doesn’t.”
Is Video Working for Your Chorus?
Please share your experience with video, and links, in the comments below.
Resources
“A Chorus Guide to Getting the Right Permissions” on the Chorus America website.
Links
“Call Me Maybe” Gets a Choral Twist on the Chorus America website
The Power of Song…and Viral Video from Chorus America's High Notes news digest.
