March 8, 2015

Ray Stevens: The Taylor Swift Music Video, entry 3...

Hello once more...an early Sunday morning after setting our clocks ahead one hour finds me putting together another fan-created blog entry about the one and only Ray Stevens. It's Three Fifteen in the morning...funny thing is an hour ago it was One Fifteen...

The current music video from Ray Stevens, "Taylor Swift is Stalkin' Me", is up to 58,532 unique views. I predict that the video is going to reach the 60,000+ level in a matter of hours. I'd be surprised if a week from today the video isn't nearing 100,000...but yet a lot of that is going to depend on further publicity, creating more awareness for the video...more high profile appearances on television/radio.



The upcoming CD, Here We Go Again!, is going to be released 15 days from now on March 23rd. You can pre-order the CD on AMAZON.

In my previous blog entry I embedded a lengthy CD preview that Ray uploaded onto YouTube a couple of days ago. Originally the video clip ran a little more than 9 minutes...but that particular upload was taken down and replaced by the 11 minute clip. Rather than create a completely different blog entry highlighting the updated preview clip I simply edited the older blog entry and replaced the 9 minute clip with the updated 11 minute clip.

Such things are common during early phases of a video (a video appearing on-line, only to have it vanish and then return).

A couple of years ago one of his music videos had gotten nearly 40,000 unique views in a matter of days but then it disappeared from YouTube...only for it to resurface again hours later but minus the impressive views it had racked up...essentially causing the video to start over from scratch.

I don't recall if there was ever an explanation given...but it's one of those things I come to expect on video hosting sites...and that's why I come off as obsessive at reporting the latest numbers for whatever his current YouTube video happens to be. In this case it's "Taylor Swift is Stalkin' Me". I'm obsessive about the numbers just in case a video may vanish for a couple of hours or a couple of days. I'd like to at least have some sort of data reflecting the unique view tally should a video vanish but return with their original play total erased.

Even though I admit that music consumers much prefer Mp3's over the purchase of an actual CD there's still something to be said for the physical CD and the effort made at creating cover art. Today most music label executives may simply view cover art as a visual publicity tool simply because consumers are likely not going to actually purchase a physical copy of a CD...but instead they'll purchase digital music files that'll download directly to their computer or other listening device...but 'cover art' displaying the artist, etc. etc. is still used even if a project is Mp3 exclusive. As you can see from the upcoming Ray Stevens CD on the left hand side of the page the cover art displays Ray, a limousine, airplanes, and a gorilla chauffeur. Ironically, this image is being used on Amazon's product page for the Mp3 (!). As I've mentioned in several previous blog entries there are 2 publicity images for this project...the one for the Mp3 is the one I've included in this blog post (even though Mp3 releases aren't CD's...it still has cover art nonetheless!). The product page for the CD features a slightly different appearance. As mentioned in other blog posts I don't know if this is the official cover art that'll appear on the CD or if we'll get the other image instead but here's another look at the cover art side by side...

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