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Music videos, with YouTube’s Racana system the dominant platform, are both a disaster business and an essential tool for artists to expand their music.
There was a time when 3D seemed like the future of video. It also had to be part of the cinema, and on the floor it demolished is Imax, the Great Rooms of Port Vell in Barcelona. But, while the 3D thing never quite came to fruition, video has always found a ground where it can take root and grow.. From TV to YouTube. New aesthetics, contemporary narratives, which often carry over into advertising and many other sectors of society. Fashion, without going any further, is a clear example of how artists and their audiovisual works can influence.
But where are you heading? Is this the golden age of the music video? It could be, but the gold shines a lot and there’s always (too much) more tinsel and silver, some of which miraculously end up the same way. This Monday, at a video clip roundtable organized by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Alex Pérez, composer (author of, for example, the 2022 hit song in Catalan, “Supermercat” by Lildami, the most played video clip in Catalan with Million “Play”) and singer-songwriter, explained the flip side of the coin that always falls to the ground.
He, as a budding artist, has invested a maximum of €3,000 in an audiovisual piece for a single “song”.. “You have to attract friends, to whom you pay very little… and you do it knowing that those 3,000 euros will never come back,” he explained. Salvador Coffey, president of the independent label Música Global, who works with Pérez, offered the view of a small record label: “Many of our artists run the videos themselves, otherwise it wouldn’t be possible.” He added that they are betting – “we know it’s lost” – on specific characters (in their wallet they have Mickey Nunez, Judit Nederman, Dr. Prats …) to shoot videos. What Youtube pays, which is a great channel for posting these videos, does not amount to a small change (we can assign a million views to about a thousand euros). Finding videos on TV is almost a miracle, especially compared to what this relationship has become.
Other miracles
There are also “tinsel” miracles that arise from very specific phenomena like Murat, who with a small budget have achieved millions and millions of views on their videos. Audiovisual has been an indispensable part of the years-long expansion of the mega urban wave that is now dominating the musical “mainstream”. It helps to develop the artist’s image and dimensions, which is why no one abandons it. And if earlier it was possible to have three or four video clips per album, now there are performers who cannot imagine a release without a video clip.
In this sense, Guillermo Enguita, member of Sony Music’s audiovisual department, explained at the event that The high consumption of music on YouTube forces us to look for solutions halfway between a hard cover and a video clip. This is how the “paparazzi” appear, very simple videos that help preserve the aesthetics of recording while playing a song on the platform.
Alex Perez also pointed out another notable aspect of the music video’s relationship. The singer explained that in his face as a composer, it was necessary to know if the song he was working on would have a video clip. This, he says, completely changes the way we work.
creation space
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On the other hand, the big stars and their delicate and meticulous audiovisual products – accompanied by an economic investment that is never enough, according to professionals in the sector – are solvent products that multiply the work of the artist called Rosalía, C. Tangana, Bad Gyal … or Dua Lipa. The Catalan production company CANADA worked with all of them, who brilliantly knew how to break through first with the ‘indie’ – ‘Bombay’ (2010), by El Guincho, was the first big hit – even today, A reference company in the sector, as well as in advertising, where they reproduce many of the things they create for videos.
At the aforementioned conference, Anna Packardet, from Canada put it this way: “Videos have an interesting artistic side, but you can also create trends in advertising and in society.” “There are creators who see it, copy it, and the circle closes,” he said, quoting from “Malamente” by Rosalía, the first “single” from “El mal querer,” which clearly transcended what was musical.
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