Who wins? It was sobered up by children in the bleachers and became a popular dance in the hip-hop community. When Boyce died in , the dance had found its way into some rap songs and videos. The song was a commercial failure until student George Miller included it in his YouTube video. Rowe Price, Blackrock, and J.
Morgan Chase; to Warner Bros, which owns global distribution rights for the recording; and to Time Warner, with its part ownership of Maker Studios. Harry Rodrigues will benefit, although not as much as many may assume, and he will have to share what he gets with the people whose work he sampled.
Boyce, the no-collar black man on the corner who gave world culture a twist, gets a little credit and no reward.
George Miller, the originator of the whole thing, gets nothing. The technology may have changed, but the money still flows the same way: to creators of contracts not creators of content.
We welcome your comments at ideas qz. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. More from Quartz About Quartz. I support Net Neutrality like the vast majority of this country and am appalled to be associated with its repeal in anyway.
On April 6th, , NBC News [40] reported that the nonprofit organization Muckrock had requested emails pertaining to the creation of the video.
Pat Brown, the executive editor of Muckrock. The majority of early Harlem Shake videos adhered to the title format denoting its numeric version ex: "The Harlem Shake v2" , but the practice soon became redundant and phased out as the volume of uploads continued to grow on YouTube.
Throughout the second week of February , more than 4, "Harlem Shake" videos were uploaded to YouTube each day, according to YouTube's official trend report. By February 13th, approximately 12, "Harlem Shake" videos had been posted, gaining more than 44 million views. Two days later. On February 14th, it reached an all-time high on iTunes, reaching 3 on their overall sales chart in the US. In March , YouTube videos shown below featuring a group of naked men gyrating on or around landmarks in Norway began circulating online.
The videos, which were created by OnkelSaft [11] as a way to entice tourists to visit the city of Trondheim [12] , begin with a peaceful view of a landmark site before suddenly jumping to another scene from the same vantage point where the entire group is shown dancing wildly to Dubstep music.
Throughout the month, the videos were featured on Queerty [13] , Out. Shortly after the breakout of Harlem Shake in , one of the montage videos on YouTube shown below was renamed to include "Origin of Harlem Shake" in the title.
On February 18th, , TechCrunch published an article [19] in an attempt to explain the meme 's appeal by breaking down the basic formula of its setup. In the article, the writer Josh Constine attributed the immense popularity of the phenomenon to its concise length at 30 seconds and a formulaic set-up that is easily replicable with enough variables to entice the viewers into creating their own iterations.
Constine also described the Harlem Shake as a prime example of a "symbiotic meme," a term that he had coined in his thesis [20] to describe the mutually beneficial relationship between the prototype of a meme and its breakout iteration in terms of mass exposure and viewership. After examining various Twitter data sets mined during the onset of the meme in early February, Ashton concluded in the article that, in contrary to the widespread interpretation of Harlem Shake as yet another accidental triumph for the Internet's hive mind, its online popularity may be attributed to active participation from a number of corporate subsidiaries engaged in YouTube partnerships, namely Maker Studios and the InterActiveCorp IAC affiliated Vimeo and College Humor.
On February 23rd, , a group of pharmaceutical students were arrested [21] [22] on charges of public indecency while attempting to create their own Harlem Shake video in the streets of Cairo, Egypt.
Five days later, a group of people gathered in Cairo to stage a flash mob -style Harlem Shake shown below, left in front of the main office of the Islamic Brotherhood. In response, members of the Islamic Brotherhood uploaded their own Harlem Shake video shown below, right wearing print out masks featuring members the National Salvation Front, the group's primary opponents.
The Harlem Shake has also been used for a student protest in Tunisia after the country's Minister of Education Abdeltif Abid launched an investigation [24] into a "Harlem Shake" video that was filmed at a Tunisian high school on February 23rd.
Abid called the video "an insult to the educational message. In the following days, the protests in Egypt and Tunisia were soon picked up by the Western news media outlets, including the Washington Post [27] , The Daily Dot [28] , Yahoo!
News UK [29] and Mashable. Numerous individuals and groups who participated in the meme have had to face some unforeseen consequences including legal troubles and disciplinary actions. But Filthy Frank's video itself culled from an earlier Frank jam carefully attributes the copyright to "Baauer or whoever is in charge" and serves up links to buy Baauer's "Harlem Shake" track on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, etc. On February 14th, "Harlem Shake" first broke through to number one on iTunes' best seller list.
At the time of this writing, the iTunes charts put "Harlem Shake" at number one overall, in the US, Australia, Belgium, Canada, and Luxembourg, and in the top five in most of the rest of Europe.
In an interview with Billboard, a representative of Baauer's label, Diplo's Mad Decent records, describes the song as "the biggest thing we've released on Mad Decent as a label, and it's happened within six days.
This is real, filtering-upwards success. Even all those YouTube views, scattered across the dozens or hundreds of fan-made videos, add up. Baauer and Mad Decent have generally been happy to let a hundred flowers bloom, permitting over 4, videos to use an excerpt of the song but quietly adding each of them to YouTube's Content ID database, asserting copyright over the fan videos and claiming a healthy chunk of the ad revenue for each of them.
Hence the proliferation of the "Harlem Shake. After all, these Harlem Shake videos are just the last link in a chain of gently borrowed content. Before Filthy Frank, it was just a song, and not a terribly lucrative one. Before that, the Shake was just a dance of uncertain provenance, something anyone could reference. But each step meant borrowing from something that already existed. Nobody involved was ever terribly keen on asking for permission.
Why would they be? For the most part, neither the borrowers or the lenders even noticed what was happening. But that open spirit has a limit, and embracing most of the song's copies doesn't mean it's a free-for-all.
When hip-hop artist and Harlem native Azealia Banks tried to upload her own remix of the track, Baauer had SoundCloud take it down. When she asked why, his response was simple enough: "It's not your song. Banks, as well-known for her internet feuds as she is for remaking other people's beats into their definitive version, accused Baauer and producer Diplo of "coccblocking" [sic] her track, and wanting to replace her vocals with Juicy J's.
Azealia isn't a random YouTube fan; she's an industry player, doing business every bit as much as Baauer is. Stick a camera somewhere, film part one, get everyone riled up, film part two, cut them together, add the slow motion effect.
The end product is remarkably snackable. Worst-case scenario, you burned 30 seconds.
0コメント