Creativity and New Media

Last August, I went to a blink-182 concert. If you don't know blink-182, they're a pop-punk band that was very popular in the late 1990's and early 2000's but then went on hiatus for awhile in the middle of last decade. When they got back together in 2009, every blink-182 fan was abuzz with the news, excited for new music and hoping some great memories could be revived.

It took awhile for them to have new music ready, but last August when I went to see them in New Jersey, it was slated to be the first time anyone ever heard some new songs from them since 2003, the year their last album was released. The August 5th date at PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel was the first night of the tour. I saw this as an opportunity to get a lot of YouTube hits for a bootleg video. A "bootleg" video refers to any live music performance not recorded by a professional.

Throughout the show, I was ready for when they'd play some new tunes, and when they finally did, I had my phone ready to record video. The iPhone 4 recorded with surprisingly great audio quality, and that night when I got home I hurriedly did a little editing on the beginning and ends of the video and uploaded to YouTube. I used tags appropriately and took to a blink-182 fan website's discussion forum to show it to some people. Much to my surprise, the next morning the video's view count was in the thousands! I was ecstatic at the prospect that my video had gone semi-viral, or at least as viral as it could get for a topic like this. At the writing of this post, the video has 3,599 views. You can view it here and I also embedded it below.