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Artist News Business News
Brown gets boost thanks to wedding video
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 30 July 2009
OK, here is a message for all of you working in sync rights. Stop bugging those ad agencies for money, and start lobbying couples planning weddings. A couple who staged an innovative dance sequence at the start of their wedding, soundtracked by disgraced R&B thugster Chris Brown, have caused a resurgence in sales of the song used – ‘Forever’.
A video of the routine (which has the sort of terrible dancing you’d expect from a wedding, though normally not during the service itself) has become a YouTube hit, and the owners of Brown’s song, Sony’s Jive division, are earning both via YouTube directly, who will pay a royalty each time the video is streamed, and from a surge in iTunes sales of the year old song, which went back to number four in the iTunes chart at one point after the video got 12 million views.
YouTube content partnerships man Jordan Hoffner brought up the wedding video phenomenon at a digital media conference in LA this week, pointing out how their new audio recognition and click-and-buy functions helped Sony monetise the latest YouTube video hit, so to make money out of the least palatable of their pop stars (post Rihanna beating).
