Three years ago my band and I published a rock music video. We’d made the video a couple of months earlier with a filmmaker who knew our bass player somehow. We’d written and recorded an entire album during the winter and we knew that there was something special about this song from the first time we heard the takes and started mixing. There was something eerie about the guitar feedback and the bass sound. Everything seemed to click for us on this particular track. We met the director at a cafe and tried to come up with ideas for a music video. I was supposed to play a murderer who had a hard time trying to carry a dead body to his car and I would then drive away into a forest with a corpse in the trunk. Pictures of the band playing would then be cut into the story.

We decided to film the live parts first, went to our rehearsal studio in the morning and begun shooting. The director put a smoke machine and spotlights all over the place and soon enough we found ourselves pretending to play the song over and over again. I remember being sweaty and slightly drunk most of the day, quite literally in a haze because of the smoke machine. After having seen the studio footage we decided to keep the video as it was and we never bothered with the storyline. We uploaded the final cut to YouTube and sent links to as many free video promotion sites as we could. The video gathered around 400 views in the first few months. We were slightly disappointed but not too surprised. Until one day in August.

When I turned on my computer that day I noticed that our bass player had taken a picture of his screen showing a screenshot of him from the video on the Pirate Bay’s homepage. We were being promoted by what we considered to be the coolest underground website on the planet! I opened a new tab and checked the number of views on YouTube. Around 30 000. I pressed F5 every now and then and saw that number rising by a hundred or two every time. Comments and likes started pouring in too. The video stayed anchored in the Pirate Bay for three days and accumulated 89 000 views during that period. An agent from Singapore called and wanted us to go on tour in Asia. A guy from L.A. wanted to be our manager. Those three days were lovely.

We released our record and got a couple of nice reviews but we had no real plan and the interest for our video on YouTube died out as we didn’t have anything to follow it up with. No one in the band knew anything about branding or online marketing at that point. We made two more videos and the band split up about a year ago. We didn’t have the time nor the energy that the project demanded. The whole thing was an eye-opener in many ways though. I realized how extremely lucky, talented and persistent you have to be to make it anywhere in the music business but I also had a glimpse of the enormous potential in going viral and how easy it is to find like-minded people out there if you really try.

This is all a bit off topic, I know, but I clearly remember trying to sell the idea of Bitcoin to the band on our way to a gig once around two and a half years ago. It feels like a lifetime has passed since. I don’t know if they ever bought any but I remember what the price was at that time, 280 US dollars.

Enjoy!

https://dtube.video/#!/v/ganoff/u5h3swpb