Shin Lim's AGT Crediting Mess

A new AGT performance by Shin Lim appeared on my YouTube this week. The video title immediately caught my attention: “Shin Lim wows with a performance inspired by Canadian magician Shawn Farquhar”.

I've worked on enough big TV shows to know the hoops one must jump through to get the person who uploads the YouTube video (usually someone from a different company to the production) to title the video exactly how you want it. And there’s no way a good social media manager would want to title a video this way. The wording of the title will have seriously impacted its virality.

Some previous titles for AGT videos featuring Shin Lim are "DON’T BLINK! Shin Lim Performs Epic Magic with Melissa Fumero”, "WOW! Magic That Will SHOCK and AMAZE You!" and "Shin Lim: Magician Baffles Judges With Incredible Card Magic". Those are well-crafted titles with keywords and incentives to click. It’s probably why the videos have 14, 8, and 9 million views.

This recent new video only has half a million views. It's Shin's lowest-performing AGT video, though there may be factors beyond its title. Most prominent YouTubers stress the importance of thumbnails and titles because if people don’t instantly want to click on your video, YouTube won’t push it out to people, regardless of how good the actual video is.

Anyway! The title is objectively bad and reads very much like a settlement to a legal dispute. I read it and assumed that Shawn had kicked off at Shin for stealing a trick of his and had somehow forced Shin to add the credit to the title as a way to settle an argument of some kind.

So, I looked at Shawn's public Facebook page to see if he'd posted any clues about what had happened. If the trick were his, then maybe he’d likely have been sent lots of messages about it, and maybe he’d managed to force Shin to convince AGT to update the title in amongst some drama.

What I found on his page was the complete opposite.

And I think it's worth saying, at this point, that I don't see this opinion piece as a drama story or news coverage. This isn’t about who was right and wrong in this scenario (though, the story does kick up a notch when we later find out about a third magician who did the idea before Shin and Shawn. Shin had to add a second credit, which Shin later demoted to the video description, and this third magician had much to say about it publicly).

This article serves as a conversation starter for public and in-industry crediting and why magicians somehow confuse being "first" with being "original." While we're used to seeing debates about in-industry crediting in magic tutorials and magic books, we rarely see such a public-facing crediting debate like this one.

Shawn shared Shin's performance on Facebook and said:

Look – for all we know, Shawn pleaded with Shin not to credit him in the YouTube video title, fully understanding the impact it would have on its reach, but Shin insisted. We just don't know what happened.

Anyway! What idea is so deserving of credit in the video title? Shin Lim performs an original card routine set to a pop song that has many playing card references in its lyrics. The song mentions hearts, spades and clubs and is an obvious choice for any card magician. The issue here is that Shawn Farquhar previously performed a different card trick but set to the same pop song decades ago.

Hang on a second; moments like this make me feel like I'm the crazy one – and in specific ways, I probably am. My career has mostly been as a creative consultant on projects with people like Gordon Ramsay, David Walliams, John Legend, Neil Patrick Harris, Dynamo, and Justin Willman. Integral to my ability to be creative is my belief that people who protect their ideas don't have many. I need to convince myself ideas are worthless in order to produce great ones so quickly.

And don't get me wrong, I also spent $10,000+ to patent a product that cost over $140,000 to develop and since generated much more than that in revenue. I do believe in protecting things, but these things can’t simply be ideas.

There's an argument with a trick like this that Shawn will get hired to perform his version less often now that Shin has his, but this argument would be much stronger if Shawn’s real name was Sting and he wrote Shape of My Heart.

There's this weird problem in the magic community where magicians confuse the terms "first" and "original". Many magicians adamantly believe that if they were the first to do something, then it is original to them and that they own the idea.

And again – I'm not saying Shawn believes this! He probably doesn't.

In most of these first = original instances, the fact that you had that idea proves that anyone could. It’s a little absurd to me that someone might have a simple idea and somehow decide no one else is smart enough to come up with the same.

Yes, there will be magicians who will get upset reading this. And most of those magicians will be the ones born at the best time to be the first to share lots of “original” ideas on the internet (that sentence actually hurt to write).

Maybe I am insane, but I'm sitting here, and I keep writing out well-thought counterarguments to what I honestly believe, and then I pause and think to myself – yeh, no. But I can relate to the idea that first = original, and I can even get swept up in the concept myself.

I used to get very annoyed whenever I saw magicians performing Hug/Anal. It’s a trick in which a spectator chooses one of five cards, and it says “Hug”. When the magician and the spectator hug, the audience sees the other four cards say “Anal”.

It annoys me that the magicians performing this trick today seem oblivious to the fact that it’s based on a Tom Stone Hug/Kill trick, which Justin Willman updated with the anal tweak.

But then, I even had my bubble burst when Tom Stone kindly emailed me to tell me a Swedish magician named David Persson made the anal tweak four years before Willman.

See, even magic-opinion-writer-Rory can get caught up in the first = original idea. I was foolish to believe the “Anal” idea belonged to Willman.

And, if I’m being honest, I’m not nearly as annoyed seeing people perform it now that I know the Anal idea was first performed by someone I don’t know and not the guy I've worked with a bunch.

Perhaps the irony with the whole "first = original" mindset is that the people who so adamantly believe this tend to change their stance quickly when it inevitably turns out they were not first. Upon discovering they were not, in fact, the first to have the idea, they don’t tend to rush to stop performing their version of the effect or retroactively add credits to all their performances, as they once so adamantly insisted anyone who performed the idea after them must do.

So, it turns out that Shawn Farquar was not the first to perform a card trick to the pop song with playing card references in its lyrics (yes, that was quite the segway). The first person to perform a card trick set to the song was Russ Stevens, who also happens to be the Britain’s Got Talent magic consultant and a Blackpool convention organizer.

Someone probably did it before him, too (though the window of time was tight). Heck, there’s probably a teen magician somewhere right now, Googling songs with card references so they can perform a trick to one in a school talent show – the poor kid has no idea they’re walking into a crediting mess.

If you watch the video Russ uploaded 16 years ago of his original 1993 performance, the video begins with a stern warning:

Russ reached out to Shin; they had a bit of back and forth, and then Russ decided it was necessary to share all in a public Facebook post about it, and he seemed to characterize Shawn's version of the idea as a "copy" of his own.

Here is the statement Russ shared:

The screenshot of a message from Shin reads:

It's impossible to verify the message from Shin, including when it was sent, and I must say that Russ very awkwardly cropped the screenshot, so there's no way to understand its context.

Christ – I like Russ – but at this point, I have nothing but sympathy for Shin.

Imagine working all your life to become the most famous sleight-of-hand card magician. You decide you want to do an original card trick set to music and choose a pop song filled with more card references than any other. Then, you suddenly need to deal with two magicians who want you to credit them in the title of your YouTube video simply because they were born before you.

Because that's the thing – Russ performed his version the same year the song was released in 1993. If Shin was born at the same time as Russ, and Russ was born thirty years later, I think it’s pretty safe to assume Shin would have been the first to perform card magic to this song.

Maybe I am losing my mind here, and I am the only person who can't wrap my head around what's going on.

I like Russ; he’s booked me to lecture at Blackpool and has been kind and protective of my tricks on BGT.

But, still, I'm sitting writing this in a cafe, literally wincing because I know deep down that it's so unbelievably hard to try to say that because you were the first to perform a card trick to a song with lots of playing card references, that you get to take over the title of someone’s AGT video with a credit.

In the world of YouTube vs., say, a movie, this might be the equivalent of, instead of asking for a credit in the end titles, requesting the film change the movie's name to include your credit. Perhaps my perspective on this entire story comes from an understanding of YouTube titles and how valuable they are to get right.

I'm all for in-industry crediting. I wasn’t always, but Ondrej Psenicka changed my mind about it during his lecture at a convention this year. Sure, magicians should credit their inspirations in magic groups, forums, conventions, and books. If they want to mention it during their public performances or in the video descriptions, titles and programmes, they can do that too. But the idea that you should need to credit someone in the title of your content if you choose to use the same well-suited pop song for an original card trick thirty years later, I mean – come on.