Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in 1975 was not the first music video (even they themselves had made what were called “pop promos” for earlier singles); but it was perhaps the most influential in both business and creative terms as, in its wake, labels and artists began making them a fixture in their marketing.
It has now become the first pre-1990s video to pass 1bn streams on YouTube (helped in no small part by the recent biopic of the same name) and a remastered HD version, with lyrics in multiple languages, is now on the video site.
That’s all by way of preamble to get to You Are The Champions (note deft pronoun switch from first-person plural to second-person plural) which has been created by Queen, Universal Music Group, Hollywood Records and YouTube Music. It involves the creation of new videos for the band’s ‘A Kind of Magic’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. They will be based partly on fan-submitted UGC, with a call going out later this week for “dancers, singers, musicians, and visual artists” to also participate.
“This will be the first of a series of custom initiatives we have planned in the coming months on the official Queen channel,” said Celine Joshua, GM commercial, content and artist strategy at UMG.
Asking people to submit footage to be included in videos is a tried-and-tested way to rally a fanbase around a project, but with this campaign there is clearly a push to also get professionals (or, at least, highly skilled individuals) involved via the casting call rather than just relying on whatever a fan has shot on their phone.
In that regard, there are echoes of The Cut in 2017 which saw Elton John partner with YouTube to get directors to create videos for ‘Rocket Man’, ‘Tiny Dancer’ and ‘Benny & The Jets’, where the winners would become the “official” videos for each of the songs.
The idea behind that was to give emerging filmmakers a break and also to ensure that the resulting videos would look amazing and, therefore, give them both creative and streaming longevity. Queen, it seems, were taking notes.
