You can only watch this music video when Uber turns on surge pricing in Los Angeles
YACHT, the band consisting of Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans, has a new music video out. It’s for the single “L.A. Plays Itself”, and it’s only viewable at very specific times of day.
Specifically, as YACHT explains, you can only watch the video when Uber turns on its surge pricing feature, where pricing is multiplied based on demand, in Los Angeles.
The band says:
Los Angeles has a bad reputation for traffic.
Uber has a reputation for surge pricing. That’s when their prices multiply based on demand for cars.
Traffic sucks, and paying extra to sit in it is even worse. To help ease the pain, we’ve got a new song called “LA Plays Itself.” It’s all about the city, and we want to play it for you when you need it most.
When surge pricing more than doubles the cost of using Uber in L.A., YACHT will also play a remix by English producer and DJ Darq E Freaker.
This isn’t YACHT’s first move in playing around with tech and the internet in marketing their music. The album that contains “L.A. Plays Itself,” I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler, was announced via a map coordinate, which led to a billboard, underneath which they live-streamed a Q&A session. That was in July, and since then they’ve announced the tracklist on Buzzfeed, sent out the cover art via fax, and offered annotations of the title single’s lyrics on Genius.
As for the video itself…I haven’t seen it. There hasn’t been surge pricing in L.A. since I found out about it, so we’ll just have to wait.
Ethan Chiel is a reporter for Fusion, writing mostly about the internet and technology. You can (and should) email him at [email protected]