Expiring Netflix Watch Instantly alerts

queuenoodle is a Twitter account that will tell you when movies expire from Netflix Watch Instantly so you can, uh, watch them. Brought you by Twitter's media pastamaker, Robin Sloan.

Pomplamoose covers Lady Gaga's Telephone

Love it. Robin Sloan has previously discussed this type of "production as performance" video on Snarkmarket but Pomplamoose has started using the term "VideoSong":

This cover is a VideoSong, a new medium with 2 rules:
1. What you see is what you hear (no lip-syncing for instruments or voice).
2. If you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds).

As NPR explains, the band is actually making a living from their covers...they sold 100,000 songs last year. Here's their album of covers on iTunes.

Stock and flow

Robin Sloan writes about stock and flow as "the master metaphor for media today".

Flow is the feed. It's the posts and the tweets. It's the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It's the content you produce that's as interesting in two months (or two years?) as it is today. It's what people discover via search. It's what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

Nail on the head. Although I think you can also consider something like "trust" to be stock as well, in which case you can use quality flow to build up stock.

Beyonce's Single Ladies covered by Pomplamoose

A good example of what Robin Sloan calls the production-as-performance video.

What I love about the approach is that it's showing us a complicated, virtuoso performance, but making it really clear and accessible at the same time. It's entertaining, but it's also an exercise in demystification -- which of course is exactly the opposite objective of every music video, ever. Their purpose has been to mystify, to masquerade, to mythologize in real-time.