A Ting Tings video... and a rant

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have gleamed from my multiple posts about the Madonna album that I was under strict instructions not to say anything about it before a specified date, otherwise Madonna would personally have come round to my house and stuffed Jelly Beans up my jacksy until my bowels ruptured.

Then, a couple of major broadsheet newspapers went and published a review and so my bosses at the Beeb decided we should, too. Cue some frantic typing and consulting of notebooks to get my opinions on the web before it all looked like yesterday's news.

It now transpires that we were one of the only organisations given an embargo on reviewing the record. Why? Because we publish online.

Never mind that the Times and Telegraph recreated their print reviews on their websites, nor that the BBC site is the most-read news source in the UK - around 30m people come to look at our pages each day. That's higher than the circulation of the Sun or the Daily Mail (which are, depressingly, the UK's top-selling newspapers).

It just goes to show that the music industry still doesn't really "get" the internet. And it gets worse - Warner Bros gave us the video for 4 Minutes last week, but told us we couldn't show it before Tuesday. Of course, it was up on iTunes on Friday, and all over Youtube within minutes, which made our "exclusive" so unexclusive that we just buried the thing in the middle of a text piece with no fanfare whatsoever.

To be fair to the record companies, it's not just them. "Online press", as it is called, is generally farmed out to small-fry PR companies by film and TV studios too. These teams, as enthusiastic as they are, often have no direct contact with the talent, and can very rarely provide anything other than review tickets or interviews with peripheral celebrities (we can speak to the girl who plays the girlfriend that gets dumped in the first episode of Skins, you say? How could we possibly refuse such a tempting offer).

I suppose it's a bit churlish to expect the BBC to get any favours in this arena... There genuinely aren't many other web-based news and entertainment sources in the UK (except, perhaps, digital spy and a few of the more influential blogs). And we get plenty of access through our TV and radio outlets which can be filtered down to the website.

But the entertainment industry's fundamental inability to grasp the potential of the internet is kind of astounding at this stage in the game. Take, for example, the Ting Tings. They're a really hot, up-and-coming band, on the verge of releasing their second single - the mighty, mighty That's Not My Name. So, last week, they premiered the video on (drumroll, please) Bebo. Fucking Bebo.

In other words, something that should be providing some much-needed buzz is being restricted to the 14-year-old users of the UK's third most-popular social networking site. There is undoubtedly some "monetising" going on here, which is why the record company has entrered into such a nonsensical arrangement, but what a spectacular way to miss the point, eh?

Anyway, it's a week late, but someone's worked out how to get the thing up on youtube (youtube), and here it is:

The Ting Tings - That's Not My Name


It is as good as a video that was made for £5 and a couple of spare lightbulbs from Homebase can be, don't you think?

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