At some point last week, Weird Al Yankovic’s Twitter account became unmanageable. Yankovic, 54, the proudly nerdy song parodist who became an early MTV staple with Michael Jackson sendups like Eat It, said last week that he tries to respond to every Twitter message from his 3.3 million followers but that the volume made even looking at his account seem like “drinking from the proverbial fire hose”. The reason: the spectacular, viral success of the online video campaign to promote his latest album, Mandatory Fun (RCA), which became the first No. 1 of Yankovic’s three-decade career. With 104,000 sales in the US, Mandatory Fun is also the first comedy album to top Billboard’s album chart since Allan Sherman’s My Son, the Nut in 1963. His new videos have been watched a total of 46 million times. “This is something I never dreamed would ever happen,” Yankovic said. Yankovic’s late-career success marries the satirical approach to music he’s been plying since the late 1970s with the most up-to-date thinking in online marketing — a content bombardment, financial backing by popular websites and a catchy hashtag, #8videos8days. Yankovic’s plan was to release a new video each day for eight days. He started July 14 with Tacky, a parody of Pharrell Williams’ monster hit Happy — complete with silly dance and long tracking shot. He followed with videos like Foil, a play on Lorde’s Royals about the uses of aluminum food wrap, and Word Crimes, a rant about bad grammatical habits set to Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines: “I read your email It’s quite apparent Your grammar’s errant You’re incoherent” Because RCA did not provide any production budget, Yankovic said, the videos were paid for by various partner sites, like Nerdist, Funny or Die and College Humor. The gambit worked. Yankovic’s Web stats exploded. On Wikipedia, his profile has drawn 575,000 views this month, up from fewer than 1,000 views last month, according to music data-tracking firm Next Big Sound. On Spotify, Yankovic’s music was streamed 3,282,937 times around the world last week, up 785 per cent from the week before. To some commentators, the video gambit recalled Beyoncé’s surprise release last year of an album complete with 14 songs, 17 videos and a direct-to-the-fans approach. As Yankovic sees it, the goal was simply to try to get people’s attention. And he bristled at the suggestion that he imitated anybody. For his last album, Alpocalypse in 2011, he made videos for all 12 songs. “I did it before Beyoncé,” he said, sounding more jovial, really, than irked. The popularity of Mandatory Fun also points to the goodwill that Yankovic has built up among both fans and fellow artists in his more than 30 years in the pop-culture spotlight. Generations of fans have grown up with his parodies, and many artists see getting the Weird Al treatment as confirmation of success. In a detail that has become part of his standard biography, Yankovic seeks the approval of each artist he spoofs; one TMZ video posted last month purportedly shows his pitch to pop star Iggy Azalea backstage at one of her shows. To some extent, the achievement of Mandatory Fun is a function of the music industry’s woes, as the number of copies sold to reach No. 1 keeps getting smaller. So far this year, album sales are down 15 per cent compared with the same point last year, and sales of individual tracks are down 13 per cent. Yankovic seemed acutely aware of the industry’s struggles and planned his marketing blitz accordingly. “For the last decade and a half, the music industry has been in sort of a free fall, with everybody trying different things to see what works,” he said. “I just thought this is a good idea that makes the most sense. Let’s give it a shot and see if it works.”
