A few months back I blogged about the fantastic video album Israeli funk musician Kutiman created using musical and visual elements from a global community of musicians who happen to use YouTube to share their works. The name of Kutiman’s finished project is Thru You and it can be viewed here -- http://thru-you.com. I wrote in the Cisco DigMediaRev blog post that the Kutiman ‘Thru You’ project illustrates how community and collaboration are important keys in the creation of engaging digital content. I welcome you to revisit the piece here -- http://blogs.cisco.com/media/comments/Community_and_Collaboration_Keys_to_Engaging_Digital_Content/ Apparently, Kutiman’s collaborative music video piece and others like it are catching on across the music industry.

For instance, the Japanese band Sour understands how community and collaboration can lead to the creation of engaging content. Sour recently created a music video for it’s song ‘Hibi no Neiro’. The music video cast were selected from the actual Sour fan base, from many countries around the world. Each person and scene was filmed purely via webcam. Ok so the description of the music video doesn’t seem that revolutionary, but watch it -- it’s fun and the video editing of the fans and how they come together is quite impressive. I note that this ‘Hibi no Neiro’ music video was posted on July 1st on YouTube. Over the past two weeks, the video has scored an impressive 480,000 plus video views. That’s almost 30,000 views a day. Impressive. I checked in on the band’s official web site -- http://sour-web.com -- and I noticed that to date they have only released a few independent albums. Amazing to think an independent band can draw a global audience of almost 500,000 viewers just by involving their dedicated fan base. And who knows -- I did not investigate other video sites -- but likely the music video for ‘Hibi no Neiro’ is syndicated on other sites and is racking up more hits off of YouTube as well. Ok, here’s the video. Enjoy. Director: Masashi Kawamura + Hal Kirkland + Magico Nakamura + Masayoshi Nakamura SOUR official site: http://sour-web.com 2009 Zealot Co.,ltd / Neutral Nine Records