When I was in high school, one of the service trips that I was lucky enough to participate in was a week in the Appalachian region of Tennessee. A gaggle of grumpy, sleepy teenage boys got up every morning at……

ps: sorry to have pre-empted some stuff here. still looking forward to your mv/adverproduct skit.

I don’t dispute anything Prog reported. And I’m not surprised that the JT video sold well.. except I don’t trust the RIAA’s or IFPI’s numbers. Having dealt with bold-faced lies from them firsthand, my assumption is they inflate numbers to create an impending sense of doom for unlicensed downloads or make things look rosy for licensed downloads. I’m not saying they’re wrong in this case, but my stance is guilty until proven innocent.

Also, I wouldn’t throw the video ipod/ itunes TV and movie sales in this argument as they just aren’t relevant. They show a willingness to pay for downloadable video, I suppose, but Gray’s Anatomy and the new Bright Eyes video are two different beasts.

Music video sales as a revenue stream are good. The JT thing shows that when you take an immensely popular artist and make a video exclusive you can generate decent sales. However, if you break down the numbers you realize that 30,000,000 videos sold / 9000 videos x $2 per video = $6666 per video. The question becomes whether this $6666 costs you at least $6666 in album sales as you did everything possible to prevent the video from working as a promotional tool for the album (removing in from youtube, not allowing the blogs to post it, etc.). You only need an extra 666 people to buy the album (roughly) due to the promotional power of the video to match those video sales numbers. I would classify $6666 as chump change. Record labels GIVE away more copies of an album than that total equal. Hell, the video, even at today’s budgets, probably costed more than this to make in the first place. This is the fundamental problem with video sales.

If you look at the non-JT success stories, they are all older, classic videos from established artists released for purchase well after the initial buzz of the album they were connected to. If music videos are products, then why are we making them before the album is released just so we can hide them for 6 months and THEN sell them. Why not make them a year after the album is out? Like I said, only 25% of top albums have a purchasable video. Music videos are schizophrenic right now: they don’t know what they are or what they are for. They are adverproducts. If the record labels insist they are both ad and product, I would imagine that the best model is to flood the market with the video early as an advertisement on YouTube and blogs in OK quality, and then sell the thing in super-nice quality on iTunes or wherever after the album itself has built a fanbase willing to purchase the video. But what do I know…

The moral of the story is that the $37 million from the video isn’t exactly coming at no cost. Making money off old videos sitting in the vault is brilliant: same brilliance as selling seasons of old TV shows on DVD. But the new stuff… that’s more tricky. You have to judge whether the video will help the artist or the artist will help the video before you can make a call of what to do with the video (when, how, and where to release it). That kind of conditional thinking is probably far beyond what executives in the record industry are capable of (zing!).

looks to me like the industry’s definitely hoping to milk the idea of selling videos. (whether their tack will succeed is another question.)

i’m no marketer or sales analyst, but here’s what i’ve found being reported:

- itunes store started with 2000 music videos in october ‘05. after 19 days they’d sold a million of those (avg. 26 downloads per vid per day); early hits were “weapon of choice” and “thriller”.
- itunes sells music videos at $1,99 a pop (of which record co’s pocket $1,40)
- the riaa estimated music video download sales at $3.7mil til end of 05
- during ‘06 itunes upped their music video catalogue to 9000 .
- according to the ifpi ‘07 report, music videos accounted for 3% of total digital revenues in the first half of ‘06
- jt’s itunes-only video release scores 50000 downloads/sales in its first 4 days in feb ‘07
- the Official UK Charts Company, having recognised “the explosion of the music video download market” led by iTunes and mobile network 3, plans to count music video download sales towards the UK singles charts as of jan ‘07
- combined audio and video sales (50/50 split) on the ‘3’ network now surpass one million units per month; the company claims second place in the UK digital music market, behind itunes, with a 20 per cent share
- total video sales (mv’s tv eps, movies, shorts) on itunes have quadrupled in ‘06 (jan ‘07: 50mil. tv eps 1.3mil. movies sold)
- something like thirty million video ipods have been sold since oct ‘05
- the itunes music video catalogue is currently reported at 10000

is it skewed to think their pace of mv sales will have increased from the early 1.5mil per month?

in the rather unlikely event it hasn’t, here are a couple of hypotheses:

A. multiplying the original overall average 26 downloads per day times the number of vids available comes to roughly 30 million videos sold since 0ct ‘05

B. assuming they merely held the pace of 1.5mil sold per month, you’re still looking at 26 million videos sold.

either way, for the record co’s this means a fresh new revenue stream worth somewhere between $37mil. and $42mil – so far. not exactly peanuts.

(i’d love to hear abler number crunchers’ take on this.)

Huh? Somehow I feel that isn’t the case. Prog just cataloged some info on this, anyway. If anything pumping money into music video may give it the boost it’s currently lacking. It’s a long time coming, too.

1) As hungry said above, we don’t know if these things are actually selling. I guess any sales are good sales in music video land, but if it is coming at the expense of promotion and thus album sales, I’m not so sure the labels are coming out on top with this approach.

2) This particular article is about music video as *advertisement*. There will be another coming up about music video as *product*. It is there that I’ll handle iTunes and tackle the question of how something can be an effective ad and product at the same time (sneak preview: music videos can’t be both).

3) The clincher was that I looked at the top 20 albums on iTunes and simply tried to see if a video for ANY song of those albums was available via iTunes. On average there seems to be 25% success rate. If I can only buy a music video for a hot new artist 25% of the time, then music video has some serious, serious problems as a product (again, to be addressed in a future article).

The real question is whether selling the promotional video years later and making a paltry sum (the iTunes “MV as product” approach) is really worth killing the revenue generating aspects of the music video as a promotional tool which can help move new album sales. My suspicion is that if music videos are going to be justified not as promotional tools but by how much revenue they can generate in and of themselves, then music video was just given a death sentence.

fun. howevah: they *are* selling mv’s (and folks are buying them…)