Video just seems to have a lot more traction that audio when it comes to traffic generation. I agree that a video of someone singing and playing isn’t generally exciting, so from a purist viewpoint the videos are a bad thing to do. But maybe not if you’re looking for traffic….

To me, the video only makes sense if you think people will benefit from seeing you play them.

I make a bunch of my music available as MP3s on my piano site (http://HealingPiano.com). I offer them there primarily for listening. There are a lot of people who play piano who are interested in learning the songs themselves, and my record company in Taiwan has released a songbook of my stuff (http://tinyurl.com/chuxpiano), but I’ve never seen any reason to make videos of my hands on the keyboard playing the stuff.

If there’s a reason behind it, then it’s probably worth doing. Personally, I’ve never found those videos interesting…either as a viewer or a music creator.

Many of the videos that people put on on YouTube and similar sites have the same problem, i.e. they don’t take advantage of the medium.

I’m going to be embarking on a project to put some of my music up for free. In theory all I need to do is create MP3s to go along with the sheet music PDFs, but I suspect I’d be smarter to video myself playing & singing on the piano instead of just doing an audio recording. The video would be boring, but it would get me more distribution than an audio by itself. Do you think I’m wrong with that one?

Eric

- why is he inadequately lit? Light just isn’t that expensive.
- why is he on camera so much? I can only watch him put his hands and fingers together so many times. Beyond a first impression, he adds nothing to the content.
- why did they build the videos with gradient background, if they were going to bust it down to a reduced color palette to save bandwidth for streaming video? Stairstepping gradients are incredibly tacky.
- the editing is meandering and inaccurate…referring, for example, to high-demand keywords on Ebay, while the highlight just shows the first portion of an alphabetical listing…not high-demand keywords. The point of video formatting is to serve as a template to make real information palatable…not a style-over-substance demonstration like this.
- the info he presents is just generalities…no useful specifics. In other words, this is purely a commercial. If he was actually offering some real helpful tips (instead of just hinting at them), it might be worth my time.

John is a bright guy, and if the final product is affordable, I’d expect it to provide some real value. Because he does things on a large scale and pays people to do research for him (or has systems built to test his techniques), I’m sure he’s capable of offering good info. People didn’t drop a grand the last time around for a complete piece of crap. But, I’m not gonna commit 45 minutes of my day to watching commercials designed to impress me with how much John knows or how much I need to spend my $300 (or whatever he ends up charging) for this product.

Instead, I’ll wait for the Eric Giguere review.