With the economy still showing signs of collapsing around our ears, and the real world apparently about to be wiped out by something Michael O’Leary reckons could be treated with a couple of strepsils, it seems that all that most people want is something to make them feel all soft & fluffy inside. First it was the unlikely star Susan Boyle, doing her signing ugly duckling thing to make her version of I Dreamed A Dream one of the most viewed in the history of YouTube. And now it seems that an unlikely group of buskers, tribal musicians and old bluesmen have become the latest feel-good sensation to sweep the globe (or those parts of it that regularly check out digg & YouTube anyway).

Uber tech-blog Gizmodo posted the video under the title Best Video I’ve Seen Today Will Make You Smile (which strikes me as a case of being damned by faint praise by someone with only a tenuous relationship with the English language, but anyway). The reason that Gizmodo is posting accoustic covers of Ben E. King tracks is not because they’ve suddenly decided that there’s a market out there for posts about cover versions but because the way it was made is, in some ways, an interesting story about how modern technology is changing the media.

If this video doesn’t bring a tear to your eyes and makes you smile for the rest of the day, you are a cold hearted bastard. Watch it from beginning to end—you won’t regret it.

This cover of Stand By Me was recorded by completely unknown artists in a street virtual studio all around the world. It all started with a base track—vocals and guitar—recorded on the streets of Santa Monica, California, by a street musician called Roger Ridley. The base track was then taken to New Orleans, Louisiana, where Grandpa Elliott—a blind singer from the French Quarter—added vocals and harmonica while listening to Ridley’s base track on headphones. In the same city, Washboard Chaz’s added some metal percussion to it.

And from there, it just gets rock ‘n’ rolling bananas: The producers took the resulting mix all through Europe, Africa, and South America, adding new tracks with multiple instruments and vocals that were assembled in the final version you are seeing in this video. All done with a simple laptop and some microphones.

Leaving aside the fact that this seems to suggest that I’m a cold hearted bastard (I mean, it was OK), what Gizmodo missed, and so presumably did the 8,000+ people who’ve dugg it to date, is the fact that the song was recorded as part of a charity initiative called Playing For Change. This wasn’t some incredible, almost unintentional Kutiman style viral, it was a planned and well marketed promotion for a cause (and a worthy one at that – you don’t often hear people saying that what the world needs is more war). The fact that it was obviously made on a tiny budget and seems to have been promoted entirely through digital channels does indeed show that the makers obviously understand how to reach people in the modern world (even if a plug from Gizmodo probably wouldn’t have hurt them).

However, before we all proclaim how this shows that the web has killed traditional media and none of us need anything other than Google Reader & a Twitter account to keep up to date with what’s happening in the world, it’s worth checking a couple of things. Because whilst the Gizmodo piece was written just a few days ago, the cover of Stand By Me has been on YouTube since November of last year (and racked up 9 million views and counting since then).

And a look at Compete.com and the Viral Video Chart suggests that whilst a lot of those views were around the time of launch, a lot more have started rushing in over the last few days. And what this suggests is that whilst social media and the web are fantastic tools for spreading news and memes far & wide in a very short space of time, it’s also often the case that things don’t really take off till the time is right: right place, wrong time may no longer be a valid saying and may have to be changed to right place, waiting for the right time.

Guitar image by Jsome1 on flickr

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