Arcade Fire Knows Where You Live
September 16, 2010 by Nate Winter
Pop quiz: what are the most innovative music videos of all time? (I'll give you a moment.)
What'd you come up with? Thriller. Closer. Vogue. Money For Nothing. Rockit. Weapon of Choice. Single Ladies. They're all strong contenders.
Submitted for your consideration: Used to Wait (The Wilderness Downtown) by Arcade Fire. Maybe it didn't make your list, but it's got something you've probably never seen in a mainstream music video-- your own neighborhood.
The Quebecois band partnered with director Chris Milk to create a music video that's personalized to each viewer by incorporating images of his or her neighborhood into the video. How's it work? You type in your address on the homepage of the site that plays the video. Then the site pulls Google Maps imagery of your street and the surrounding area into the video. So your neighborhood plays a starring role in the video.
I tried five or six addresses and invariably got the error message "Your address doesn't contain enough Street-View and/or Google Maps data to 100% enjoy this experience." That was daunting at first, but I went ahead anyway and was still impressed with the results.
Despite it's technical drawbacks, The Wilderness Downtown is an innovative, first-of-its-kind project. It marks the moment where a music video is more native to the web than to TV. As this trend of personalization inevitably continues and evolves, more music videos will rely on the interactive nature of the web.
So kudos to Arcade Fire, Chris Milk and the "friends from Google" who developed this groundbreaking video. You've led us out of the wilderness and into a promising new world.
