YouTube Stars!: It's Friday! Rebecca Black and ARK Music Factory

Friday, March 18, 2011

It's Friday! Rebecca Black and ARK Music Factory

Its been a fun fun week, watching the Rebecca Black "Friday" video go from 1.5 Million views when I wrote about it on Monday, to over 17 Million views on Friday! I am here to follow up on the story.

We now know a bit more about Rebecca, the song, and the company that produced it. Rebecca is 13 and goes to a charter middle school in Orange County CA which provides "technological skills, fine arts and health exploration and multi-cultural awareness." She played the lead role in her school play, "Oklahoma." She contacted ARK Music Factory, which offered her a choice of two songs they had written, and she chose Friday to record and make into a music video.

Rebecca Black

Some have said that the song has non-rhyming lyrics that make no sense, too much autotune was used and the green screen video effects were poor. I have kept and open mind and decided after I had heard the song several more times that I like it! The video is good too, for what it is; it is fun to watch! Friday is being market on iTunes, classified this way: "Genres: Pop, Music, Children's Music Released: Mar 14, 2011 ℗ 2011 Rebecca Black" In the past three days, I have seen it go from #68 to #54 to today at #31 on the iTunes Top 100 chart, so obviously people are buying the track.

If you can understand that this is a children's song, written by a very new production company, and sung by an 8th grader - then you may be able to appreciate it for what it is. Rebecca Black, and ARK, are just starting out, let's see where they go! Rebecca has already been a Trending Topic on Twitter all week, had millions of views of her video and been on Good Morning America - thats a pretty good start!

There are some nice people at ARK's website, as well as a fair share of trolls that come into the chat room and act outrageously for attention. The ARK site is powered by the Ning Social Networking engine and has the ability to post pictures, music, and video, and there are blogs, forums and a chat room. You can Friend people and message them, just the same as any other social site.

We spent some time in the chat room this week, using our Ning "TJ" account name and met some enthusiastic musicians at all levels of development of their musical skills. There was a wide range of opinions exressed in the chat room about RB, Friday, ARK, and the other ARK musicians. Just like the video, people seemed to either love or hate the song, the video and ARK. Most were able to act civilly and provide their opinion respectfully.

Here now are a bunch of YouTube videos from some of the people who visited ARK this week and put a link to one of their YouTube videos in the chat.