Mash-ups showcase

I've been nonstop crazy busy for the past two weeks, so only have time to get to this now. One of the coolest events at the South by Southwest Music Festival came on March 15 during a mash-up event sponsored by Outhink and IODA, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance. (By the way, regular readers know that I don't subscribe to the common blogger propensity for ignoring any event older than 24 or 48 hours old. Such is the case here.)

Outhink worked with IODA to persuade five independent record labels to make a music track available for videobloggers to remix into a video mash-up. That is, the song would serve as the soundtrack for a collage of images and video drawn from the public domain and from original footage.

If you're a band, what could be better than having vloggers create free music videos for you? It's a hell of a lot cheaper — and often more interesting — than the six-figure productions charged by professional music video directors.

This, I predict, is going to become a huge phenomenon in the years ahead: musicians and video artisans working in tandem.

Here's the rest of the story: Once we obtained permission from the labels to use their music, I asked a half-dozen leading figures in the videoblogging world to create a mashup. Here are the results, from Steve Garfield, Ryanne Hodson, Josh Leo, Annaliese Rittershaus and myself. Three vloggers chose the same track — all of them are pretty cool.

Track: The Organization (play video here or here | Ourmedia page) (mp3)
Album: Get Firm
Artist: The Herms
Label: Jackpine Social Club
Mashup producer: Josh Leo

Track: The Organization (play video, 640x480) (play video, 320x240 version)
Album: Get Firm
Artist: The Herms
Label: Jackpine Social Club
Mashup producer: Steve Garfield

Track: The Organization (play video)
Album: Get Firm
Artist: The Herms
Label: Jackpine Social Club
Mashup producer: Annaliese Rittershaus

Track: Texas_Snow (play video) (mp3)
Album: The Quiet Vibrationland
Artist: Oranger
Label: Amazing Grease
Mashup producer: Ryanne Hodson

Track: Return of the Champion (play video here or here | Ourmedia page) (mp3)
Label: Survival Guide For The End Of Time
Artist: Heavyweight Dub Champion
Label: Champion Nation
Mashup producer: JD Lasica

Michael Verdi also shot a lot of video footage (scroll down) of the podcast interviews conducted at the event.