WNYC’s Soundcheck program recently did a little music video state of the union. We had the host John Schaefer, Wired’s Eliot Van Busrkirk, and the hardest working man in music video Patrick Daughters rapping on the odd simultaneous rise and fall of the music video industry. And wouldn’t you know it but the trio pretty much gets everything right. The quick recap (fused with my own comments):

The decline of music video budgets.
I don’t need to rehash this. The labels’ profits are declining, they’re looking to cut costs, and music video budgets are an easy way to do it. There’s nothing wrong with trimming a bloated budget, especially when…

The viral video reigns supreme.
Video budgets have little to do with their success. Viral is the rage these days, and viral operates best when it’s cheap and “real”, not expensive and fabricated. Buskard likens the viral phenomena to a lottery: it’s unlikely it will happen but if it does it’s fair benefit for little cost. The only real problem here is that the success of a viral video may not translate to increased album sales, ticket sales, or any increase in money really. In either case, declining budgets and viral videos have led to…

The Fan Video
Tom Sawyer painting a fence. Brilliant analogy. The fans dig it and the labels save money: win-win, but it’s a well you can only use so often. If anything, it indicates that…

Gloss is dead
Well, mostly. This would seem to effect rap more than anything. The rock kids are fine with a DIY aesthetic (or a faux DIY asthetic). Maybe crossover stars like Timberlake (or even Kanye) can get away with big budget affairs as they will get enough exposure to justify the cost. Everybody else needs to realize that shooting it with a cell phone and uploading it to YouTube is good enough. Speaking of YouTube, this new distribution method combined with decreasing profits has led to…

Music Videos as Product.
The labels are reactive, not proactive. They are reacting to declining sales by charging for anything they have the rights to. There is a disconnect however in that the labels aren’t recognizing that music videos (and other peripheral products) have an audience precisely because they are free. It’s not like people want these things so bad and would have been willing to pay this whole time. Music videos are making a comeback for the same reasons they made an initial splash with MTV: they’re essentially free and a lot easier to get than they were previously. Take away the low price or ease of access and you fundamentally change the equation. This is what’s happening now. This is why the big question now is…

How the Hell Do You Make Money with Music Videos?
The consensus seems to be that it’s possible, but the industry just hasn’t quite figured it out yet. This is likely stemming from a failure to shift old assumptions (more on that later). The interesitng bit seems to be that while technology has surely beaten music video budgets to near death, it has simultaneously brought them back to life with ease of access. More often than not, music videos are some of the most viewed vids on YouTube. So where the hell is the money? Well ad revenue is a given (get ready for ads before those YouTube clips). Buskirk brings up developing technology that will allow a song to be identified in a given video clip and royalties for ad revenue generated from the hits can then be distrubted back to the label. This goes for *any* video clip, whether it be from Michel Gondry or that fan video you made in film school 2 years ago. Very interesting.

The idols are false. The sacred cows are dead.

Reflecting on this turmoil: why videos left, why they are coming back, why the music industry is dying… to me it all stems from a very simple problem and that’s tradition. These traditions lead to improper assumptions, weakening the foundation on which they lie. There are a few universal “truths” in this industry that are far from truths. These false truths need to die because they’re weighing the ship down.

MTV used to be great.
MTV was never great. It was flawed from inception and I’m glad it’s gone. It didn’t go away simply because MTV sold out: it went away because it sucked. Watching hours of videos to finally see the one you wanted is a patently ludicrous idea in this day and age. Labels paying money so a channel can tell us what we should be watching: who the hell decided this is some sort of ideal to champion? The internet has opened us up to control, and having control is much better than channel churning the same video cycle all week long. Nobody would like a television that didn’t let you change the channel.

If MTV played videos non-stop 24/7, I still wouldn’t watch. It’s no longer relevant. MTV plays reality shows now and they’re wise to do so. The new MTV may suck, but the old MTV wasn’t all that great either. Let it go and move on to bigger and better things.

The “album” is the crux of the music industry.
The “album” is dead. In every way. Music purists can lament it all we want but the truth is that normal people don’t listen to albums. They listen to songs, or singles, or soundtracks, or (shudder) ringtones. Only music nerds listen to albums and music nerds are a niche. A niche can’t support the weight of the music industry. People were never buying albums… they just bought them to get to songs. Sure their were exceptions, but by and large if you listen to a whole album or lament the rise of the digital single you need to accept something: you are a music-nerd. You are a part of a niche. Your niche can’t support the music industry. What you want is going to kill the music industry, not save it.

I love albums and I don’t want them to go away. This is why we need the labels to stop pretending album sales have anything to do with financial success. George Lucas is rich because of ticket sales. He’s *ridiculously* rich because of toy sales. If you want the pure “art” of albums then you need to accept the poverty that’s associated with the starving artist lifestyle: you don’t get to bitch about the state of the industry. If you want healthy amounts of money flowing, you need to stop pretending you are a character in High Fidelity and just let go. Buy your albums and let everybody else subsidize your love by watching an ad supported YouTube clip that they turn into a ringtone.

Once we stop trying to turn back the clock to the good old days that never were and stop trying to increase the sales of something nobody wants maybe, just maybe, we can start making some money. Hopefully it will be enough to keep the art alive.

UPDATE
30frames agrees and disagrees. For the record: I’m not saying there was no good to be found in MTV (namely: accessibility), but was it really accomplishing anything more than Top 40 radio aside from making the music industry even more about image than it already was?