Anyone is invited to submit a video to YouTube Play, even video creators themselves, and the submission deadline is July 31.

The videos may consist of animation, motion graphics, narrative, non-narrative, or documentary work, music videos and even "entirely new art forms" that challenge the perception of what's possible to do with video, explains the YouTube blog post about this unique collaboration project.

Two hundred of the leading videos will be selected for further attention by an international jury of experts from the worlds of art, design, film and video. Twenty of those initial 200 videos will then be presented at the Guggenheim. Yes, that's right - at the Guggenheim itself. The YouTube videos will appear in the Guggenheim network of museums in New York, Bilbao, Venice and Berlin on October 21 and will be made available for the world to see on the youtube.com/play channel.

This isn't a contest per se, as the winning videos don't receive a cash prize or other sort of physical reward. But having a video dubbed "art" and being showcased internationally in one of the world's most famous art museums, is a reward in and of itself, most would agree.

This isn't the first time YouTube has proven itself the medium of choice for artists worldwide. Last year, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, an online experiment in music, sought out musicians to participate in the world's first collaborative online orchestra where the endgame was a performance at Carnegie Hall.

YouTube: Internet Leads to Instant Success?

What's most interesting about this current art competition as well as the Online Orchestra is the way that it is able to surface undiscovered talents and allow them to achieve fame without all the requisite toiling and tolling for years in "starving artist" mode, as was once par for the course for those wanting to break into the art world. Instead, with YouTube, a handful of videos can lead to a lifetime of success. Just ask Justin Bieber. Or Soulja Boy. Or Esmee Denters. Or Journey's new singer Arenl Pineda, discovered a few years ago. Or FRED, the annoyingly overactive boy whose high-pitched voice befuddles parents but whose videos and associated kid-friendly merchandise have made the teen rich beyond belief.

But while the above are certainly high-profiled examples, let's be clear about one thing: When it comes to art and music, YouTube hasn't surfaced the next Leonardo or Monet, the next Beatles or Stones, the next Janis Joplin or Jimmy Hendrix. To date, the folks who have made their way up through YouTube are not necessarily, forgive me Bieber fans, going to make their mark in the annals of history as being among "the best of the best." In some cases they may be great... but are they the greatest? Really?

However, with this contest, that may change. For next-gen video artists, there's surely no better place than YouTube to flex your artistic muscles. It should be interesting to see what video creation wins this latest attempt to elevate YouTube to art form. The end result will likely be just that: art.

Not so many years ago, consumers had little choice when it came to buying new music. If you fell in love with a favorite song from an artist or band, you bought the CD. Singles had already been phased out for the most part, so the choice was either to buy the CD or nothing at all. For this reason, artists were able to make oodles of cash even when they were only a one or two-hit wonder. Yet somehow, the music industry is convinced that people actually bought CDs for all the nifty content contained in the included booklets. With the iTunes LP, they're reinventing that booklet for the digital age and packing it full of media like lyrics, liner notes, album art, photos, and even videos - that last one being something that you certainly couldn't cram into the CD case in days past. With this digitally enhanced LP, labels hope consumers will once again buy complete albums, not just individual songs.

Unfortunately, this "interactive" album of the future, meant to rev up album sales, is a sad, uninspired effort which tries to cram the old business model of the past down the throat of today's new digital platform. While the extras are nice to have, the iTunes LP doesn't offer anything more than what fan sites do, as we noted yesterday in our critical analysis of Apple's new offerings. And unlike fan sites, which evolve and change over time, the LP is a static offering that doesn't take advantage of the platform it lives on - an internet-connected digital music player.

Forget the Album, Buy an App

Meanwhile, as record labels scramble to save themselves with this new format (and possibly even one of their own dubbed "CMX"), some artists are starting to figure out the formula for success in this new era of single-track purchases and app-laden phones...and it's not an album. A handful of forward-thinkers have come up with a way to offer true interactive content to fans, which in turn, encourages fans to purchase more of the artist's music. The answer? The iPhone app.

Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, these music-themed apps are innovative new ways for fans to interact with content produced by their favorite artists. For example, Nine Inch Nails released a multimedia application earlier this year where fans can access a mobile version of the fan site nin.com, interact with other fans through location-based chat and photo sharing, stream tracks and exclusive playlists, download wallpapers, and much more. Although the app is free in the iTunes app store, the side effect of having more engaged fans means having more people interested in buying the band's music. NIN, headed by front man Trent Reznor, is no stranger to this sort of out-of-the-box thinking. He has experimented with a number of ways to make rockstar-worthy income in this digital age, including last year's introduction of a creative multi-level pricing scheme for albums where consumers could download tracks that ranged anywhere from completely free all the way up to a $300 premium package. Within three days, that experiment grossed $750,000 in sales. Not a bad way to sell an album.

But Reznor isn't the only artist with an app these days. American DJ and singer-songwriter Moby has also just released an official app created by social music service iLike which offers similar functionality. Besides providing access to exclusive content, fans can interact with each other through Facebook and iLike and they can post photos directly from the app to the Moby fan community. However, unlike NIN's offering, this app isn't free. It currently sells for $1.99. Whether or not this particular money-making gambit will work, though, is still to be determined. The app is only a couple of days old at this point so it's unknown whether fans will pay.

While apps like those described above essentially provide mobilized fan communities, hip hop artist Soulja Boy went a different route earlier this summer. Using a new app platform called Romplr, his $2.99 application, "Soulja Boy Tell 'Em," lets fans remix the artist's tracks and share them with friends via email, Facebook, or via www.romplr.com. In many ways, this app represents the best use of today's digital platform by allowing for true interactivity with the music. In fact, the press release about the launch even claimed "the next wave of fan and band interaction is going to be through the iPhone." Perhaps it will be the future of music sales, too.

The trend of artists with apps shows no signs of slowing down. Just today, popular R&B artist Usher launched his own app, too, "Usher's Top 100." This app, basically a streaming radio station of Usher's favorite tunes, will appeal to fans who want to know what music has inspired the five-time Grammy award winning star. It, like Soulja Boy's app, is not free either. The price is $2.99. Again, it's too soon to tell how well it will sell.

Only the Beginning

Although this is only a handful of examples of the new ways artists are using the mobile platform to interact with fans, all of these methods are arguably more inspired than the iTunes LP digital album. Instead of thinking that the old way of doing things can simply be tweaked for the new economy, these artists are developing compelling interactions which will either be direct sources of income as paid applications or will indirectly encourage sales through a more engaged fan base. While it's too soon to tell how much extra income these apps will add to the bottom line, if we had to bet on anything that could potentially "save" the music industry, we wouldn't put our money on the LP. It looks like the future is apps, not albums.

That dynamic backend technology - semantic markup - adds additional context to data about the artist which can include anything from previous bands, past collaborators, venues played, and more. The metadata is then linked together to create relationships that you may not have even known about before. 

Most of the information for the project comes from MusicBrainz, an open content music "metadatabase" that lists information for over 400,000 artists. To make a BBC music page, the contextual information surrounding the artist is imported to their BBC page. By using the artist's "MusicBrainzID," web page creators can integrate the artist's Wikipedia biography, too. Reusing this content is a better use of their time and energy, says Shorter, because the content is already available on the public domain.

As more projects like this take advantage of the publicly available metadata available, the beginnings of a real semantic web can finally take root.