More On Online Video

Bay Area newspapers pick up the story about my brother's online video phenomenon. The point is that as soon as there's a real way of monetizing online video, it becomes something that serious time can be devoted to. I haven't been able to put much time into online concert videos etc. so far, because the costs in time and money outweigh my resources... and I have a violin to practice!

On the other hand, as soon as online videos start producing revenue, people worldwide (musicians included) can treat them as a more serious endeavour. I expect by the time we finish the Virtuoso Violin tour (did I mention tickets will be going on sale this week? :) ), this attitude will be commonplace, and a video of a concert uploaded to Youtube will be a standard way of extending the reach of the event beyond the live concert itself, supported by advertising income.

If you think about it, this has global implications for progressive inter-cultural musical development, because once wireless internet hits the developing world (Nicholas Negroponte: 1 Laptop per Child), there's no reason why all world music cultures can't be distributed in this way; musicians would earn a dollar income from it, and benefit from a geographically unlimited reach (let's leave aside for a moment the small matters of access to electricity and a video camera...). If that happened, it couldn't help but affect the way that these countries' social cultures integrate with the rest of the world (in the way that new EU countries adjust to the established benefits enjoyed by long-time EU nations), with all the cultural side-effects that that would bring. Yes, a good balance between traditional values and progressive fusion of ideas would need to be found, but with determination it can be done.

Update: I'm told Revver.com already has a working model of this. Though no doubt it will need adoption by Google/Youtube in order to become mainstream.