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Last week, Videostatic tweeted about this article in Newsweek – referencing how music videos are back. Back I say!!

I had missed the article for two reasons. One, I was unaware that Newsweek was still a going concern (I’m also weirded out by the new, TV Guide shape of Rolling Stone, so let’s say I have ‘issues’). Two, I can barely read.

The piece, by Ramin Setoodeh, makes some quality points. It even captured that brief sliver of time when Gaga was still ahead of Der Bieber.

The reason music videos have come back from the dead is simple. They are the perfect length—three to five minutes—for abbreviated online attention spans. They are easy to share, tweet, Facebook, and comment on. You can watch them from the comfort of your own home (or cubicle, when you’re procrastinating at work).

One thing I will add is that Setoodeh gives a decent amount of credit for the ‘revival’ of music videos to YouToogle. He also blames the standard villain for knocking MVs off of MTV – the reality show. Now I agree that once MTV realized the profits available with the Osbournes and the Sweet Sixteeners (let alone The Situation) videos were doomed on Viacom owned airwaves. But there was one villain (and I am using that word sarcastically, no one or no network ‘owes’ music videos airtime) left out of the piece – YouTube itself!

Once YouToogle unified all the disparate places people watched videos – the jig was up for MTV. Maybe the younger types don’t remember the earlier days of the web when finding videos online was almost impossible. During this era, the MTV.com site never really worked if you had a Mac. Hard to believe, but true. Assuming that this current ‘truth’ is not one of those interlocking dreams that I am waiting Juno to wake me up out of. Anyway, I digress …

Youtube came in and simplified the way we watch web videos. Search in one spot and pretty much every clip will available, and it will actually play. No more codecs or Windows Media blah-de-blahs to download. Youtube fixed all that and thus became THE place for videos on the web. Thus, YT (which always makes me think of Y&T – but that is another story for a more summah time) became the dominant place to watch videos and thus –

MTV stopped running them. Once any music video I want is available, ANY time I want it on the Internet – why do I watch a block of clips on MTV? The answer is: I don’t. If you’re a fan of My Chemical Romance, you don’t watch clips for Drake, drumming your fingers on your step-mom’s coffee table – you click on your computing device (hint: it’s disguised as a phone) and watch the desired MCR music video immediately.

When I was younger it made sense to sit through Pointer Sister videos to see the hoochie girls in short skirts get out of the car in that ZZTop video. There was no other way to see scantily clad women, or, for that matter ZZTop videos.

But in 2010, the internet does a great job of chopping our media consumption into smaller and smaller niches. If I want to read internet postings just from fans of MCR – I can do that. I can wall myself off in a narrow alley packed just with ideas I have heard a million times before (Hiya, Fox News). Or I can explore new artists and videos based on suggestions from my friends, or just based on what catches my Ritalin tempered attention span. That is how people see new videos now, and the benefit is that as soon as the song or the video starts to bore me - I can click away to something else. Under no circumstances am I going to sit in front of a television, watch through a whole video of an artist I don’t like, in the hopes that the next clip (that I also didn't choose myself) will just happen to be something I like. That channel has been changed long, long ago.

YouTube may now be ‘saving’ videos (If you consider $40k budgets for established pop acts to be ‘salvation’) – but first YouTube did a hell of a job kicking music videos in the nuts and ending video blocks on the biggest outlet, MTV. So for that, YouToogle, I say, umm, ‘thanks?’

Read the whole Newsweek article - here.

Labels: insider, MTV, music video, My Chemical Romance, philosophy, selling, TRL, video link, videostatic, YouTube

Happy New Year to all!

Hey, I got some mail. Okay, not really mail, but over on the ‘Ville, a poster named budget added the following comment:

Would you please weigh in on this article: Music Industry Looks To Internet For Revival Particularly this quote: "Universal Music, the industry leader, has said that it makes “tens of millions of dollars” from YouTube." We're making 10k videos that end up making their labels millions of dollars! We're still getting screwed over!!!

Okay, here is me weighing in …

First of all, click on over to the Financial Times and read the brief article. While doing that, remember it is the FINANCIAL F^&%ING TIMES. Everything in that article is skewed towards investors and potential investors. If ‘High Times’ magazine covered the recent Presidential election (maybe they did, my subscription ran out) you can bet that HT focused on which candidate would make it easier for their readership to get high. Financial Times has just as skewed a world view. FT is all about telling investor/readers where they might (or might not) want to put their money. The info in that article is bound to be massaged, but doesn’t mean it ain’t useful.

The fact that Warner and Youtube/Google are beefing over the percentages means that there IS some money to be made from the ads that run over and alongside the videos. The “Music industry looks to internet for revival” headline at least seems reasonable. But how much money is really there?

This is where the waters will get murky. You gotta remember the recent financial collapse was preceded by lots and lots and lots of articles in FT and Wall Street Journal about how the markets and the economy and the mortgage universe was doing just peachy. The financial press is full of ridiculously upbeat projections and predictions that are not justified by real-world facts – these kind of publications are often more cheerleaders than news sources. (Note that I have taken down last year’s prediction that the shoot for the film ‘Vicky Christina Barcelona’ would turn into a Penelope Cruz – 30f – Scarlett Johansson sandwich. Sigh.)

Anyway – take any and all income predictions and earnings estimates with a Fat Joe-sized grain of salt. Here is the quote that perturbed mr. budget - “Universal Music, the industry leader, has said that it makes “tens of millions of dollars” from YouTube.” Now contrast that with “Hulu and YouTube would make about $70m and $100m respectively in US advertising revenues in 2008” from a little farther down in that same article. How do those things fit together? (Hint, they don't.)

Now, Uni is a big player, but if YouToogle as a whole is making $100million per year (and this estimate might be as cooked up as the financial health of AIG and Fannie Mae) then how could Universal possibly be getting that much? I am unsure what the sharing arrangement is, but if YouTube makes a hundred mil, the copyright owners probably don’t get an equal share – so the copyright owners of YouTube clips can’t be getting the ‘same’ $100 mil, can they?

Back to Universal. Uni’s supposed “tens of millions” means multiples of ten, right? So “tens of millions” means at least twenty in my book. That is 20% of YouTube’s (alleged) total revenue (and forgetting for now that the split is unlikely to be 50/50). I imagine Uni might earn 20% of the music video based revenue on YouToogle, but music videos are a fraction of all the content on YouTube. A popular fraction to be sure, but if YouToogle brings in $100m, much of that must come from wedding videos, skateboarding tips and dogs eating burritos, right?

This leads me to the conclusion that it is highly unlikely that Universal makes what they are saying off of YouTube videos. There are plenty of other claims in that article that can be parsed, but you get the point. Like fisherman, businessman make big, boastful claims. Especially if they are trying to convince shareholders that all is well.

Now, onto the most salient part of budget’s comment/question: “We're making 10k videos that end up making their labels millions of dollars! We're still getting screwed over!!!”

Yes, plenty of directors have budgets of $10k or less to make videos, and these do end up on the internet and they might be earning the record label some cash. But my guess would be that Britney, Jay-Z and their fellow megastars earn the majority of the online revenue for a label and plenty of the low-end jobs (let’s say the $10k range) attract way, way less viewers and thus less ad revenue. It is unlikely that Universal is earning their (fictional?) tens of millions off of the low-end jobs. Long tail and all that.

The real reason that MV budgets were big in the 90s was competition. To get played on MTV, a video had to beat out rival videos for limited air time. TRL and other prime spots on Viacom's cable-waves were prime real estate. As more and more videos got made, the labels had to spend more and more to attract the eye of MTV’s programmers and win those scarce slots. This led to the kind of budgetary arms race that brought us Puffy’s ‘Victory’ and O-Town’s ode to nocturnal emissions ‘Liquid Dreams.’

But, now, with the ‘air time’ on the ‘Net being limitless – why should a label pull out the budgetary big guns? A once scarce resource (exposure for the videos) has suddenly become free. The labels need to attract eyeballs, but the eyeballs they are after are now the end consumers and not a conference room full of people at 1515 Boadway, and winning that attention seems to be based more on having a hot song or a visual hook (i.e. synchronized treadmills) rather than massive post effects or stunts like the ‘big’ videos of old.

So, budget, does that help any? It doesn’t make that $10k budget stretch any farther, but hopefully you’ll see that the labels likely aren’t raking in the money off Youtube clicks for Shwayze. To be honest, $10k is probably an appropriate amount to spend on a music video if the label is hoping to get a few dollars back from YouTube advertising.

If we don’t like the budgets the labels offer, we can always turn the jobs down. Ha.

Anyway, I won’t turn down questions. Send me an email or drop a comment below.

Labels: label, mail, MTV, music video, philosophy, prod co, TRL, video link, viral video, YouTube

Hey, did you hear? There is a new Britney Spears video. It hasn’t been getting much press (well that and the Radiohead pick-a-price adventure) – so I thought I would let you know about it.

I do not want to get into piling onto Britney’s personal life or pointing out all the substandard elements of the clip. Anyone with eyes can see that. This is an actually decent pop song with a flat and effortless music video. Not much more needs to be said about the clip itself.

How and why this particular video got made does interest me, though. The director is listed as Jake Sarfaty. Some have said this is an Alan Smithee name for Jake Nava, a director who has worked with Britney before with some success.

The director of “Gimme More” is not the well known director of highly professional clips for Beyonce and Mariah. Jake Sarfaty is a real guy, a gaffer/grip with a reasonable amount of below-the-line credits on a variety of productions. So how does this guy end up directing a video for one the most (in)famous artists around? I certainly don’t know for sure – but my guess is that no one else would do it.

There had been talk for months and months about Britney making her OWN video. Jive didn’t want to pay (they thought the market wasn't ready for a "comeback") and yet Britney wanted to get out there right away and answer her critics. Is answering one's critics ever a good idea? How about answering the critics with a pole dance? That'll do the trick.

So this other, never produced, self-made Britney video was probably a different song, but I recall the story being that she wanted to shoot a clip where she was crucified on a cross made out of tabloids. Brilliant! This rumored video was supposed to get shot at Britney's own house and she reached out to some real directors – who came back with budgets and the like but it never took off. The story was that Britney was paying with her own money, so perhaps a professional was gonna cost too much or maybe someone talked sense into her and she decided to wait a bit on her “comeback.”

But finally, Britney gets the video she has been wanting to make - over the protestations of Jive it seems. There are soooo many mistakes with "Gimme More." Britney clearly needs some time off, both personally and in the marketplace. I don’t think people are ready to see her as an artist again, right now. She is still the “train wreck” in most people’s eyes and we are not ready to hear what she has to say musically. We are still more interested in whether or not she wears shoes into public restroom or gets her kids taken away by Sheriff’s Deputies. This is too soon, but it seems like Britney is not getting the best advice these days, or at least not listening to it.

Spending one’s own money is almost always a mistake. Anyone that casually watches Entourage must know this. It makes sense that Britney wouldn’t want to spend too much of her own money on a music video, so that is how a gaffer with zero directing credits gets the job.

The whole thing comes across so half-assed it is actually more like quarter-assed. It seems thrown together and almost completely unplanned. The song ain’t bad, but this isn’t gonna spark any kind of lasting comeback - despite the current surge of popularity on iTunes. Videostatic posits that we are watching for all the wrong reasons – and I have to agree.

The video for "Gimme More" doesn’t come across like a career move, but rather a desperate grab at keeping the mercurial flame of fame alive. All I can say is that Britney’s gonna need to find some more flammable stuff to throw in to keep it smoldering, because our attention is gonna burn through this balsa-wood thin distraction in way less than fifteen minutes.

Watch "Gimme More" on mtv.com.

Labels: Beyonce, Britney Spears, insider, mariah carey, MTV, music video, trainwreck, TRL

Before you read this, you have to check out James’ post over on SRO. Seriously, this whole post is me arguing with that post, so you better read that first or this will make even less sense that I normally make. And it's pretty good, too.

James is definitely correct that MTV was never perfect. Many people in the MV community have an incredible amount of nostalgia for a Viacom sponsored Utopia where clips ran like honey and it was always “120 Minutes” (but never “Yo! MTV Raps” – hmm). James is right, we all need to let that fantasy go. “Where Have You Gone, Nina Blackwood?!?!”

That being said, MTV hasn’t always sucked. James writes that MTV was flawed from its inception, but I completely disagree. Sitting through three hours of Erasure and Lionel Richie videos to get to ZZ Top is obviously not gonna work today. But back then, it was great. I eagerly sat through the clips I didn’t like (and probably learned a lot, like sometimes it rains men, whatever that means) because it was way better than doing my homework. Would that young version of me have preferred to click and watch “Hot For Teacher” over and over again? Sure, but he might have never seen a music video once he learned he could also click and see porn, but I digress.

Early Roman sewers would seem terrible by modern standards (now there's a digression). For more info, check sewerhistory.org. Those early sewers would not meet today’s building codes, but at the time, they were an advancement that allowed for urban living – where cities could grow large without disease wiping out swaths of the downhill population every summer. Early MTV, was a leap forward – but still not what viewers want today (insert river of shit joke here).

Okay, sewers may be a stretch. Watch an old music video and see how long the shots last. They hold on some angle as the singer awkwardly lip-syncs, unsure if they are supposed to faux-sing AT the lens or not – and the shot holds and holds and it seems like forever. Tastes change. What worked back when doesn’t work now – but that doesn’t mean that it sucked back then. Our perspective has changed, but the history has not.

You could argue that YouToogle is great for viewers – we can see what we want, when we want it. That certainly is progress. But what is convenient for us is not always better for the industry. It would be convenient for me if Ferraris were free, but the people that make Ferraris probably have a different view.

When MTV (and radio) pushed content at us – we passively absorbed clips we didn’t specifically search out. They shoved stuff down our throats and a lot of the time we bought it, like a pre-blue pill Neo. Freedom’s just another word for “nothing left to lose.”

The IntraTubes have not shown much of an ability to convince people to go buy an LP/cassette/CD/MP3/brain-chip implant. This new “click it yourself” model is great at getting the videos out there, but – at least so far – not so good at turning those eyeballs into dollars. Those dollars turned into music video budgets for all the clips we loved (and the ones we sat through as well).

Labels: media, MTV, music video, TRL, viral video, YouTube

If you work in music videos you have probably had this conversation with someone – perhaps a relative, someone older than 25 or pretty much anyone not in the “tween” or “hipster” demographics. They are the Normal People.

NORMAL PERSON
What do you do?

YOU
I work in music videos.

NORMAL PERSON
Really? I love music videos! Which ones have you worked on?

YOU
(Name of most recent job)

NORMAL PERSON
{Blank Stare}

YOU
(Name of larger, more famous job you worked on months earlier)

NORMAL PERSON
{Blinks, then more staring}

YOU
Lot’s of videos. You probably haven’t seen them. MTV hardly shows videos anymore.

NORMAL PERSON
You know what video I like? That one where Michael Jackson turns into a werewolf. (Or perhaps they will cite the one where the Pearl Jam guy jumps off the balcony or the one where Puffy parties and drinks champagne.)

Let’s face it, normal people don’t watch videos. They did when they were in the right age category – but they’re not anymore. Normal people will complain that MTV has changed (which it has) – but regular people “age out” of the MTV demographic, just like kids age out of watching Nickelodeon. Normal People don’t know much about videos, and they are fine with that.

For those Normal People who think that they love music videos but yet can’t recall a single video since Peter Gabriel Shocked the monkey (and no, not the LCD Soundsystem one) – the AP has given them the 411.

Maura at Idolator linked to the AP article about the falling budget-scape of the MV world (you may have heard about that).

Stavros Merjos, founder of HSI Productions and a longtime producer of videos for acts ranging from Britney Spears to Will Smith, doesn't expect to ever see another $2 million video: "The record industry as a whole has shrunk. There's not as much money to throw around."

Merjos sees the effect particularly in hip-hop, where sales declines have been the steepest and extravagant videos by the likes of Notorious B.I.G., Dr. Dre, Diddy and Jay-Z used to be commonplace. "You were expected to have a big video if you were a top-flight or a serious up-and-coming hip-hop artist," says Merjos. "They're not doing the size that they were doing in the heyday. - AP

This got me wondering. This article is clearly written for Normal People – who barely think about videos and probably believe MTV is still running episodes of Singled Out, Austin Stories and Cribs (oops, they still ARE airing Cribs) instead of their beloved Banarama clips. I don’t begrudge those Normals their lack of interest in MVs, I have trouble sustaining my own interest at times. But if the level of music video knowledge and interest implied by this article probably doesn’t come with much “giving a shit” about budgets on the part of the reader.

Big ups to the AP for dropping the mad knowledge on the Normals, anyway. Next week, an article on how they really made Lionel Richie dance on that ceiling.

Labels: death, media, music video, TRL

On MTV's TRL today (January 24) there were two very disparate acts in the top ten. Okay, this is not unusual, but what was odd, was that both groups seemed to be wearing exactly the same outfits.

Yes My Chemical Romance and Pretty Rickey both appeared in clips where they were dressed in matching band unis. Some kind of Drumline homage, perhaps?

This has not happened since Rammstein and 98 Degrees both showed up on Dutch TV wearing identical wife-beater tank-tops in early 1999 - but that is another story for another time.

*Yes, I am aware that the Chemical Romance video was NOT the one pictured above. Today's video is a different, new clip - where the group is also dressed like Sgt. Pepper's Gothic Hearts Club Band.

Labels: controversy, music video, TRL