Music Video Product Placement

I'm currently in the development phase of a music video with a friend of mine and while brainstorming our approach, we looked to mainstream hip-hop videos for inspiration. While surfing YouTube, we came across the video for Fergie's Fergalicious single.

At 2:51 into the video, there is gratuitous technology usage, as is typical. The multitude of dancers all take a listen to the song they're dancing to on an MP3 player that opens to reveal a small set of speakers. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the device is held in pure commercial fashion.



Since when did music videos start having product placement? It's literally a commercial within a commercial.

It's not like the label needed the cash to make the video (although you can tell that the budget for it must have been huge). What's happening is that advertising is getting so pervasive that ads are selling adspace in their own ads!

Sigh. I guess it's just all part of the machine to keep people buying crap they don't need. And more importantly, to keep people buying crap that they'll annoy me with on the el trains.

The End of Blockbuster?!

I just came across this post about the coming end of Blockbuster.

For the past 8 years, I've been boycotting Blockbuster due to their censoring of movies before and after production. Finding an unaltered version of Last Tango in Paris or even Terror Firmer was impossible. Even worse was Hollywood execs changing films in production to fit the moralistic nature of the company's leaders.

Finally, thanks to the power of Netflix, Blockbuster is on the way out and I, for one, am glad to see it go.