I'd just like to point out that I wrote an editorial many, many years ago praising music videos. When I was a kid, music videos, metal music videos were a rarity to be treasured. Whatever crappy hour long "metal show" was playing past midnight got taped time and time again, just to catch ONE Testament video, ONE Helloween clip. Granted, we had to suffer through five million cock rock songs and I am sick to death of Close My Ass Forever, the Ozzy and Lita Ford power ballad that got played every fucking night apparently. Then came the internet and the thrill of downloading a Real Audio file all night to watch a video play on the size of a postage stamp at about 12 frames per second. Next, high speed internets sprung forth and then YouTube just changed the game. YouTube made DVD video collections obsolete. Any and every music video since the dawn of time is archived on there. And now the role of the music video has changed.

The whole point of a music video in the first place was to have a promotional tool to sell an album. Now, in the old days, the cost of the music videos would come out of a band's expenses. For example: Let's use a band and pretend they are completely even on their debts and expenses. Their balance to Record Label Buttlords is zero. So, this band, The Shittalkers, shoot a music video for $20 000. This now means they have to sell $20 000 dollars worth of albums to make up for the cost of the video. Once they do however, they begin to make money off the album sales again. Notice how no one really makes money DIRECTLY off the music video. In fact, if the band sucks (which is often the case), then they don't sell enough albums to make up the cost of the video. They can still manage to have the label do one or two more vids to try and get another promotional push to sell. Def Leppard famously had Pour Some Sugar On Me save Hysteria's ass seven months after the lead single Women was released to crickets. Once Sugar hit American airwaves, the album blasted off and sold millions of records.

Nowadays, there's hardly any physical sales, millions of streams are combined to somehow make up a "sale" and all that fun stuff. But there is a huge difference though. YouTube monetization. YouTube will pay the user as a monetized partner for original content. If you go around and look at the average amount that gets paid out, it's something like $5000 for every million views. Now, since most bands suck, getting a million views is as far fetched as travelling to the moon. However, there are still loads of music videos that have garnered multiple millions of views on relatively small labels or even as independent artists. And, most videos today are cheap shitty green screen or just low budget in general. This way, costs are kept low since hey, no one is buying any albums. As an example, let's look at Alestorm and Drink. This looks like a cheap video, yay the band is having fun because they are a joke band, but it has also received 35 and a half million views. 5000 x 35 = 175 000. That's $175 000 freedom dollars. Since the video looks like it maybe cost fifteen, that's alot of extra revenue generated. The uploading account is Napalm Records. So does this mean that Napalm made $160 - $175 000 off this video? Does Alestorm get any of this? Or does this mean that Alestorm is directly funding every other band by way of the label making a shitload off their YouTube vids? I dislike the band very much and would like them to stop making music, but still, they do deserve to get paid for their work. Even I can admit that. Is this issue even brought up in contracts these days?

Another thing about modern music videos that I am not a fand of are the "lyric videos." I don't dislike lyric videos in general, it's just I dislike when labels act like they are doing the band a big favor by making them. Back when YouTube first started, FANS made lyric videos for free and they were kinda crappy. Basically, they were the songs that weren't music videos playing over a solid background while the lyrics floated by. Nothing fancy but hey, you can at least listen to deep cuts you know? Nowadays lyric videos are touted as something like a favor from the label and they range in quality from a shaky cam and lyrics to half music videos. I say half because there will be some motion from the band, but you can tell they are obviously keeping this low budget. These types of videos just seem lame to me, someone is doing them on Windows Editor and acting like they got the Coen Bros to film their next longform music video.

This isn't a rant completely against music vids. I do understand their purpose and they are making someone money. I just hope that bands aren't getting screwed in new and exciting ways by the labels due to the newness of streaming and monetization clauses.