This is a Columbia Business School student, playing Columbia Biz Dean Glenn Hubbard as Sting (or is it Sting as Glenn Hubbard?), complaining about Ben Bernanke getting the Fed chairman job (instead of him) to the tune of the Police’s “Every Breath You Take.”

It’s brilliantly done, with some nice Fed jargon slipped in and even some pretty good singing. And it’s one more indication that the new era of user-generated content (or, as I’ve seen one blogger more eloquently if tendentiously put it, “authentic media”) holds untold riches in store. In the past, something like this would have been done at a talent show seen by a couple hundred people. By putting it up on YouTube, the creators have immediate access to a global audience. They posted it last Thursday. As of mid-morning Monday, it had been viewed more than 108,000 times. And I’m betting that on this one the viral contagion is just getting going (I first heard about it this morning). [I had to switch to Google video because the YouTube link stopped working.]

Of course, it’s only a parody. It’s interesting that so much of the “authentic media” being created these days consists of commentary on or parody of the creations of those of us in what I guess has to be called the inauthentic media. But maybe this is just the transitional phase. The popular music industry seems to be starting to come out the other side of the great Internet destroying-and-reinventing machine, and I’m mostly of the impression that the new iTunes/MySpace/podcast infrastructure is a lot better at getting interesting music to people than what went before. It’s just that, not having any clear idea of what the rest of the media is going to look like — and being employed by a big media company — I can’t help but worry about my paycheck.