HANGING OUTWITH During the Hangout, Goulding chatted But enough musicians have picked up face to face with 60 fans who took turns on the service that Google has kicked in being onscreen. Some wept during theirnew features. In December, it introduced chats as they asked Goulding such personal On Air, the ability to record and rebroadcast questions as "How do you know you're in Hangouts. When selected, a video recording love?" One young fan turned his webcam of the session is automatically uploaded to around to give Goulding a tour of his tinythe artist's YouTube channel, where he or dorm room. A mother and her daughter she can choose to edit and publish the con- THE BAND in Australia showed her the view of thetent later. And in August, Google launched weather there from their window. Studio Mode, an enhancement specifically "It's a very warm experience," Boguckidesigned for recording music. Instead of re- New social video services help artists develop says. "That's not easy to achieve in digital." cording a video on a narrow frequency band The use of online video to promote art-used for voice chats, Studio Mode captures a niehrinad sanni ehsin witiavanisratarart ar:II1 airshi intim% ists in any mainstream fashion dates back wider audio spectrum designed to mimic the I.;IUbUI I CAI -11111U I UldllUllbIllpb VVIIII IIICII Id to the days of Myspace, Bogucki says. quality of a professional recording studio. "Back then, video was expensive to pro- Major acts have taken to Hangouts, in- duce," he says. "Nobody could do it unless cluding Bruno Mars, whose Oct. 1 Hang- It could also be a new revenue stream they had a label to help finance it. Then theout drew 128,000 participants. Other big Flip video cameras came out, and we started names that have had Hangouts include the BY ALEX PHAM giving them out to our artists and telling Black Eyed Peas, Maroon 5 and Taylor Swift. them to record anything they wanted." For Google, recruiting celebrities to do At about $150, the Flip camera was cheap Hangouts can bring big benefits for the and simple to use when it came out in 2003.company, comScore VP of industry analy- It encouraged people who had never used asis Andrew Lipsman says. jack Conte and Nataly Dawn, the a mashup of YouTube and Skype group videovideo camera to begin recording everyday "It's always a challenge to get people to use singer/songwriter duo of Porn- conferencing. occurrences. But sharing those videos on- new technologies," Lipsman says. "Using ce- plamoose, know all too well how That may not sound like much, but toline was fraught with technical complica- lebrities can really get people over that hurdle hard it is to get people to part withConte, the result was "like magic." tions-until YouTube came around in 2005. and get them used to a new behavior and get 99 cents for a new song these days, "There are a lot of ways to connect with Today, so many people have cellphones them to adopt it more organically. Twitter was much less $10 for an album that the two had your fans online," says Conte, whose band is with video cameras that users upload morethat way. It didn't really take off until celeb- spent countless hours laboring over. well-known for having leveraged all manner than 72 hours of video to YouTube every rities like Ashton Kutcher started using it. So it came as a shock when they found out of social media. "Many of them are mediocre. minute. And more than 800 million people If the audience reaches critical mass, it can how much money they'd just grossed from a Or the calls -to -action aren't taken very seri- worldwide visit the site to watch 4 billionvault a technology to new heights." 30 -minute webcast they did in May: $3,267. ously. With Stagelt, I honestly don't knowhours of video each month. The number of For artists, the return on investment It was more than the band generates in what it was, but it was like magic. Our fanspeople watching online videos continues tois more difficult to calculate outside of merchandise sales in an average month. The formed a very deep connection with us, and grow. In the United States, more than 188 Stagelt, where a live session can generate live event-attended by 450 fans and broad- we were able to form a deep connection with million people watched at least one onlineanywhere from a couple of hundred dollars cast from the comforts of a recording stu-them." clip in August, an all-time high, accord-to several thousand dollars. When used as dio in the group's Sonoma County, Calif., In an era of unlimited access to billions ing to comScore. Each viewer watched an a marketing vehicle, figuring out the up- home-was produced by StageIt, a Los An- of hours of digital media, people put moreaverage of 22 hours of video that month, side of interactive social video becomes a geles startup backed by Sean Parker, Jimmyvalue on unique, even fleeting, experiences, up 23.6% from a year earlier, comScorelot more slippery. Buffett and other investors. according to StageIt founder/chief executive reports. Folding artists into Hangouts is a logi- StageIt, along with Google Hangouts, Spre- Evan Lowenstein. That's why StageIt events "Now, video is richer and more interac-cal step for Google, which has struggled ecast, Gyroskope, Evinar and Shindig, arearen't archived. Artists also can limit atten- tive," Bogucki says. "And platforms liketo build a social network in the shadow of among a burgeoning crop of online video dance to further emphasize the exclusive na- Hangouts also make it more intimate." Facebook, says Danny Sullivan, editor -in - services that promise to deliver more mean- ture of their events. Introduced in June 2011 as a video -chat chief of MarketingLand.com. ingful, face-to-face engagements, while giv- Another reason interactive social videofunction for users of the Google+ social "It contributes to what Google is trying to ing acts like Pomplamoose new ways to makeworks is that it offers a wealth of one of the network, Hangouts have become one ofdo, which is look for partnerships to make money. Online video has been a staple inmost valuable currencies on the Web-au-the most popular features of the service, Google+ look like it's culturally relevant," the social marketing toolbox for years, allow- thenticity, says Polydor Records head of digi- Google+ spokeswoman Iska Hain says. Sullivan says. Without musicians' active ing artists to broadcast their performances tal Aaron Bogucki, who coordinated a GoogleThe Mountain View, Calif., technologyinvolvement in features like Hangouts, to the world. But these new services add aHangout for British songstress Ellie Gould- company, however, doesn't disclose user Google+ risks looking like an abandoned layer of real-time interactivity that's akin to ing on Oct. 8. metrics for the service. "house with broken windows," he says. 26 BILLBOARD NOVEMBER 10, 2012.