Are Music Videos Dead?
What do you think about the state of music videos?
One side of the story..
Music Videos Aren't Dead! I really feel Antvilleans (and mv makers) are getting somewhat ripped off here because of the way we watch videos.
The way we, specifically Antvilleans, now consume music videos has changed. For the majority of us, no longer do you see all of these wonderful videos on shows such as 120 Minutes, Alternative Nation, etc. (Cheers to you folks in Australia who watch Rage!) Nowadays we have come to settle for less.
Instead of sitting in your living room, passively watching music videos in a relaxed setting, now you are watching them mostly at your desk or on your laptop, in almost always low resolution, and in a tiny little box. (iPods aside here: I don't have one.)
I just watched a few recent music videos in high quality on my TV and it is remarkable the difference between the two, at least for me. Here are some examples:
CSS "Let's Make Love.." Before, I agreed with benroll on the video's messy charm. But after watching it on TV, I think it's a bit more solid than it lets on. The photography holds Cat's ideas in place here; it becomes much more cohesive and the scenes are more striking.
Zero 7 "Throw it All Away" While I enjoyed it quite a bit on my monitor, after I watched it on TV, I have a different opinion. You can't quite feel it on the computer, but that little blue widget doesn't jive with the rather organic photography of the video. Had the widget been a real object, not drawn in, the piece would have felt much more cohesive.
Death Cab "I Will Follow You.." (version one) Death Cab "I Will Follow You.." (version two) I loved Jamie's version on the Internet, and on TV the photography really makes this one (dare I say) perfect. It'll likely be one of my faves of the year. Meanwhile, Monkmus' version had that weird watery effect on it. As he notes in the Directions commentary, this was actually in-camera, and it looks a lot less fake on TV than it does on the Internet.
I make this same argument for YYYs "Turn Into". Watch it on TV, and you'll see why it's really good. I'm looking forward to seeing Sheena is a Parasite on TV as well.
Alas! Music videos are much better than we often realize!!
If only one could say the same for the quality of the music...
The internet will eventually pass TV in quallity. And your TV will have a computer inside. Everything will be on demand. And youll be able to turn to channel videos.antville.org and watch videos here in HD by the year 2009 ;)
The music video is not dead. Nothing is dead these days. It's just that most of the people doing it have no ideas. Mediocrity can set in on anything, but every now and then someone will strive for something great and it will impress us and everyone who said that [some art form] was dead will be talking about its rebirth and other such crap.
Guys, even Vaudeville isn't dead (just not as in demand as 100 years ago).
This site is almost a subsidiary of Uturd. The quality of which immediately effects the viewing and work of the performers and the shooters. So I say it isn't so much dead, but conveniently being killed.
Are music videos dead? Hell no. They're more alive and vibrant than ever. Since joining the Antville soul train (as well as attending RES events and generally scouring production company/directors/and bands sites) I've seen more good videos in a couple years than in 2 decades.
The problem is that they're hard to find on American TV. The rest of the world has caught on that it's easy and cheap to run a network where record labels shell out the own cash to produce content for you. Somewhere along the line, MTV (sadly, the only place where you'd find videos) decided that they could make more money by showing Road Rules for 24 hours straight.
People are still making amazing music as well as amazing videos. It's pretty odd that this happens, as indie musicians and directors can barely hope to earn any of the sweet green that a Britney Spears or Dave Meyers could pull in. But these people, the people making videos, are artists. And as long as someone's willing to fork over a few bucks to help them buy film and rent a camera, they're going to make thier art. Regardless of who sees it.
I agree with Hakai. Computers and TVs will one day merge, no doubt. The one thing that I am not so sure about is the "on demand" thing.
While being able to see any video at any time is great, it's also nice to have a programmer help guide you to cool stuff. That's what makes a DJ so precious. So, yeah, one day and one day soon, some entrepreneur will see the landscape and realize that he can make money by showing these things.
Until then, I'll have to watch them on the internet.
Well antville is like a VJ. A VJ made of many people posting videos. But it is on demand at the same time because you can click and watch them at will. So its the best of both worlds.
I couldn't agree more with hakal. This is the dream we're living -- co-curating for one another, seeing videos when we want to see them and being able to discuss them from all 4 corners of the world. It's mind blowing!
I also agree that the quality of watching on computers will developm and barring pure global meltdown - which probably will happen - we'll all have projectors connected to our computers and those will replace television.
I do think big money will leave mv as the record industry rapidly evaporates. Then artform will be about sustainable art, art made on the cheap, which is a luxury our digital age affords us.
My only complaint with this site is that, for the most part, the videos that are commented (with exceptions) on are the elaborate productions. I understand this, because it's part of video making and the cultural dialogue going on.
I make my own videos and I make them for basically no $ and I'm proud of them, and perhaps I should be grateful that no one comments on them for fear of negative feedback, but it'd be nice to get a peep.
And so on that self-promotional note, I'll post the link to a video I made which I think is surely worth at least one comment from the world outside my own:
Online communities all have a shared DNA. I think the thread that will never die on antville is the once monthly "assess the state of music videos" post.
This is generally a slow season for big music releases.
I was talking today to an artist on a major label who's really business savvy and he said that he's giving up on videos. The outlets for being seen are too narrow and disparate.
He was thinking from his band's point of view, however, as a marketing device.
I do think the days of the wildly expensive video are very numbered. We've already passed the great late 90s and early aughts when the sort of middle budget video got paired up with artists like Bjork and Raidohead.
But the Johan video says to me that there are still a lot of avenues and experimentation to explore and we also should be, those us who are filmmakers, finding ways to exploit and push the new visual languages and the fact that cameras are ubiquitious now. Technology in films leads to aesthetics - the French New Wave would've been nigh on impossible without the Eclair.
The video will never die. Some artists will get it better than others. And the future is online. Youtube will someday be spitting out hidef quality video.
And as hakai points out, for those of us who love the form of the video, how could we complain with antville? I'm out of town shooting a video tomorrow and I still get to check in every day and see awful to incredible work and I get to choose when I watch it. Fuck MTV.
I'm with Winch on this one. Despite budgets apparently dwindling, there seems to be more interest, more good work, more channels (not necessarily TV ones) for accessing music videos than I can ever remember. Digital technology is obviously enabling a lot and fast broadband, sites like antville, on demand TV (soon) allow us to take a more engaged and participatory, curator / collector approach than ever before.
Digital technology is definitely driving the whole thing along. You can achieve great production values on next to nothing if you know what you're doing. Things are changing at a very rapid pace and it's an exciting time when the field is open to all comers.
When it all settles down again, I wonder if we might look back on now as a bit of a golden era.
I wanted to jump onto this little discussion. Will the music video die as a legitimate art form? Probably not, as kurse petulia exemplified earlier: if it's possible to produce it then someone will produce it.
But a more fitter question is if the music video will die as a cultural vehicle. In the 80's and 90's videos became the way for tons of music to grab a visual reference and exploit it. So you could associate a type of music with a type of image, and the two combined could for the most part give a glimpse of some urban subculture. Hence you watched videos to understand the music, to put it in a context that would round it out, explain what the music was all about. In those two decades the huge production of thousands of music videos year after year, coupled with dozens of other phenomenons shaped the western audio-visual culture. The moving image is now the most trusted source of information for anyone, if it's on video then it must have happened.
The advent of the internet and it's fleeting, populist nature is starting to change the way people interact with information. For the most part, people are more active, more vocal than in the past; the internet gave everyone a soapbox, to rant or to shout gibberish. Because it's so accesible and so fast, it's on the internet where subcultures are being displayed and viewed these days. Now people don't need the video to give them a reference about the music, you simply go the artists website and fansites and other information sources where you can learn what the music is about and inmerse yourself into the subculture which the music is part of. In the past, music videos were canonical, they had the power to mesh with the music and become a unified product that in it's heyday could become news on it's own right. I think the best example of this are the mid 90's Michael Jackson videos. Each time they were premiered, they would end up in the news, as a cultural breakthrough. Hence, most videos were made to fit the kind of cultural significance the music had at the time.
This phenomenon has faded in the last few years, nowadays videos are produced mainly to populate the airwaves, but don't have the impact of before. Culturally, that need for shock and amazement has been filled by the celebrity cult, the papparazi photograph, the hidden camera, the week's gossip.
This has made the music video a much more free art form, but with less distribution and accordingly less budget. The directors have less strings attached to them as to what they shoot or don't shoot, but in turn there are millions and millions of videos produced very cheaply to put a picture to all the music that's being placed on the market. In conclusion, the music video has lost and will continue to lose a lot of power in the cultural marketplace, to the point where I think the music industry will lose interest in it as a marketing tool. People just watch what they want now, and they even produce their own visuals for the music they like, so rendering the music video an object of interest for those looking for something interesting to watch (i.e. antville and the such).
I DID NOT SAY THE MUSIC VIDEO WILL DIE AS AN ART FORM. AT ALL, IN ANY WAY. YOU MISQUOTE ME TO SUIT YOUR THESIS.
I SAID VERBATIM -
"This site is almost a subsidiary of Uturd. The quality of which immediately effects the viewing and work of the performers and the shooters. So I say it isn't so much dead, but conveniently being killed."
Oh, sorry kurse, I misread the user name, my bad. I was talking about petulia's comment about the vaudeville. Sorry if you felt misrepresented.
I think one of the important things that the industry needs is fresh blood to make videos exciting again, and a different perspective on what videos should accomplish and what they should look like. I think nearly everyone on here isn't so much lamenting the death of videos as they are a TYPE of video - mid 90s videos for artists that we've already developed a sort of nostalgia for. And this creates a two-fold problem for this site:
- It leads to the best video directors spending all of their time on good videos that are mostly an homage to the mid-90s videos that they grew up on.
- It leads to the criticism of any video that DOESN'T look like an homage to mid-90s videos by people who like videos the most (namely, most people on this site).
Really, a good majority of the time (although not always) this site isn't as much about music videos, as it is about an unspoken nostalgia for mid-90s videos from Gondry, Jonze, etc.
I think music videos need to feel fresher, look braver and more relevant to our times, and have an overall new visual language for the year 2006.
Until production companies, directors, MTV, and everyone who's still living like its 1995 honors some fresh new ideas, then yeah, we will probably be watching the slow but inevitable death of a nice little niche industry.
spit: could you elaborate on your two-fold problem? which videos are a homage to mid-90s videos? and how do we critizise videos that don't fit that criteria? (examples please)
Thanks MV - no worries!
I was still mad about video quality versus film quality... guess I'm outdated.
The music videos are not really dead, but they're losing spaces to be seeing. In the case of Mexico, MTV removed the credit of the directors, and they guide the preferences to a teen market, which videos are like: face, boobs, dance. Spaces like this make the diference to keep the music video viewers updated of the new things that are coming. And one interesting thing that is happening with Myspace is that bands are locating amateur music video directors to create their own videos that will be on their pages. We don't need MTV anymore, we only need pages like this to guide where the cool videos are.
myspace.com/moonmanmex
full picture
The still-ongoing death of the music industry, and arguably of pop culture in general, has made music video recede from view, at least a bit. I feel we'll get less out of the medium this year than we even did last year.
down to a trickle
"TV ads, where the real money is." yeah right…
Oh cmon, kev. Since the beginning of the medium, good videos and bad videos have been released every year. If last year felt less than great, it might have more to do with your taste in music (and music videos) than the overall health of the industry.
"Alternative" and "indie" music took a backseat in 2010, and those genres are usually responsible for the types of videos this site celebrates. Pop music videos were huge last year (and were viewed like crazy online)-- Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas, Kanye, and Usher all released epic videos that were important to their success. Maybe you just weren't watching?
Even with that success, budgets are still crazy low, meaning vision and innovation are taking a backseat.
I'm down with pop music (much much more than you'd think), but pop videos just don't cut it in terms of artsiness.
Kev, I just think the trend you're talking about isn't "music videos are dead", it's "alternative and indie music are in a slump". They don't have Gaga sized budgets because they aren't making Gaga sized money. 15 years ago it made sense for labels to make altrock bands a budgetary priority, but what band would warrant that at the moment? It doesn't help when the "arty" bands that labels splurge on tank (M.I.A, MGMT), since it makes them reconsider the next time a band of the same genre demands a big video.
Kev, One more thing I want to add: Consider this: When Spike Jonze and Gondry were in their mv heydeys (let's say 94-97), it was in the wake of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, etc releasing chart-topping albums. Labels saw alternative bands as a revenue source and spent the next 5 years throwing money at their videos in the hopes of landing the next big hit.
For instance, Ween and Spike Jonze were given the cash to make this monstrosity. If this song were released today, it probably wouldn't even have a video.
Similarly, when the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Strokes, and The White Stripes were all being touted as the next big thing back in 2001, we saw a renewed label interest in altrock. For the next 5 years, bands like Interpol and Secret Machines were given the opportunity to make large-scale music videos in the hopes of cashing in on the trend (and thus, Patrick Daughters career).
Look at last years charts. It was completely DOMINATED by pop music. The top rock song of the year was by Train, for pete's sake. A few bright lights like Neon Trees, Florence and the Machine, Cage The Elephant, and The Temper Trap had crossover hits (and comparably larger video budgets), but it was mostly a rebuilding year for altrock. It all goes in phases.
It's just a shame the pop artists weren't looking to push the music video envelope. Just Gaga and Kanye.
