PSY - How a Music Video Promotes the Artist

PSY is a South Korean singer, songwriter and rapper his genre being "K-POP". PSY reached 2,780,427,341 views (as of today) on YouTube on his video of "Gangname Style" and still holds first place for the most viewed music video on YouTube - nearly 5 years from its publish date. The music video went viral across the world.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing refers to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes. It's a phenomenon which facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. To stimulate attention in viral communications emotions need to be taken into account the first being pleasure - in this case it could be humour as PSY represents himself in a humorous way in the video. The second, would be shock which may interpret itself as anticipation, intense surprise, embarrassment or violation of cultural norms, in this case it could be the catchy and choppy lyrics of the chorus creating tension as well as the unusual unique dance moves in the music video.

Success of Viral Marketing

Gangnam Style used strong techniques of viral marketing leading to a great success. The success of the video lead to people creating parodies of the song, multiple videos can be found on the internet of people creating and uploading their own creation of the song, "Gangnam Style." The signature dance moves in the video was replicated in these parodies. The parodies that people created also gained a lot of views as some were uploaded by popular internet stars. This gave PSY free online promotion of the song - increasing his sales and popularity further, the artist wasn't very well known particulary in the Western hemisphere before the music video blew up on the internet - now almost everybody on the internet knows his name.

Issues of Viral Marketing 

The issues of viral marketing is that spam may become a problem, when something goes viral it's typically almost all everyone sees on their feeds - making people fed up creating negative publicity for the artist. This also generally focuses on short-term success, as noticed with PSY this one song blew up and nobody was interested in future songs or albums from him.