YouTube Musicians Are Doing It For Themselves

May 17, 2015 9:45 AM

It started with Scopitones in bars, then people Wanted Their MTV or watched Friday Night Videos or let their videos Pop Up. The common thread? All that production and distribution took giant piles of money that generally could only come from Big Labels. Then came the march of technology: mp3, mpg, h.264, iTunes, Garage Band, Final Cut, dSLR, and all the rest. Now, not content to just share self-made mp3 audio, the current batch of YouTube musicians are making ever more elaborate music videos, and growing a big audience, without a major label in sight.
posted by LastOfHisKind (10 comments total)

Well, these are low-budget but not no-budget; someone's clearly invested some money in props, casting and equipment. It would be interesting to know where the makers got their cash, who was involved in putting it together, and what their total investment was.

(No-budget tends to be jokey or just straight concert footage on a cheap camera + iMovie or other editing software; I've made a few of those myself). Lots of bands just don't bother, or rely on local TV show performances/fan videos instead.

The original Here It Goes Again by OK Go set the standard for no/low-budget brilliance, of course.

These are impressive technically, though I wish I liked the songs/plotting better. I wish the first one had taken their alternate reality/Sliding Doors concept a little further.
posted by emjaybee at 12:01 PM on May 17, 2015

growing a big audience != selling lots of stuff to a big audience
posted by j_curiouser at 1:59 PM on May 17, 2015

Weird Al financed the making of the eight-videos-in-eight-days for his last label-released album* from everybody EXCEPT the label (Nerdist, College Humor, Funny or Die, Yahoo, YouTube, even the WSJ for 'Mission Statement'). Of course, 30 years of ever-growing success helps to make such deals.
*which he has said may be his LAST label-released album period. All a part of the changing times.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:38 PM on May 17, 2015

What's novel to me is the three example videos are more integrated into the Youtube ecosystem and vlog conventions. By which I mean, the videos don't end when the song ends, but then continue with the "Please Subscribe! Please Thumbs Up! Click Here For Other Songs!" or with the Joey Graceffa video, (the link from "more") he transitions to a Vlog-style talking to the camera thing.

And if you look at their channels, two are uploading at least once a week, if not almost daily, and most of their videos are their wacky comedy stylings. It seems BriBry (Linked from "ever") is the only one who has music uploads as a clear majority.


So is it getting more and more away from the conventions of music video television, but on the internet, and more into being its own thing? Though if I snip off the last segment from the videos and ignore the context of the channel, maybe there's less to distinguish it. So I can't think of it as a creative innovation and only as a marketing innovation?
posted by RobotHero at 8:13 PM on May 17, 2015

I guess a short way of putting it is it feels to me more like "Youtubers make music videos" than "musicians use Youtube." Except, again, for BriBry, who has a lot of videos playing the guitar and singing. (Which doesn't count as a "music video" even though it is a video with music in it, funny how that works. If there is an internet native version of the music video, maybe that's it?)
posted by RobotHero at 9:39 PM on May 17, 2015

I'd agree with that. There are certainly musicians out there who put music videos on YouTube and it's basically a publicity mechanism for them. For these YouTube natives(*), advertising revenue from people watching their videos is a significant portion of their income so it makes sense to push the "Like! Share! Comment! Subscribe!" stuff pretty hard. I don't have a problem with it, that's just how the game is played in this domain.

I just think it's great that technology is such an enabler here for people with relatively small resources. Compare to the major labels who are currently monopolizing the limited remaining vinyl press capability to reprint oldies for boomers wanting to play the Stones on the turntable again.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 10:02 PM on May 17, 2015

Sorry, forgot the footnote.

(*) BriBry notably donates all his YouTube income to charity in memory of a deceased friend.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 10:03 PM on May 17, 2015

I prefer the low-fi sweetness of iMovie7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsUhZvS9PrY
posted by judson at 8:10 AM on May 18, 2015

The videos in the O.P. are like low-budget bands trying to make something that could have aired on MTV. (when they still played videos, haha)

The videos Sokka links to feel indifferent to that goal. With all the shots of him pushing buttons, it's sometimes more like an instructional "how to play music" video than a typical music video.

Which is the sort of thing I find interesting; we're more likely to see the invention of new genres in the areas in which these things aren't trying to be like TV music videos.

With the "Youtuber makes music video" thing, I guess they are also making something more literally personal than if it was airing on TV. Like the Joey Graceffa video, he includes his boyfriend in the video and from the comments I gather it's kind of a coming out video for him. So they have that going for them.

I wonder when will we see a sort of self-made Monkees, like a boy-band crossed with a sketch-comedy troupe that all rent a house together and make videos every day about their life together intermingled with the music.
posted by RobotHero at 11:18 AM on May 20, 2015

Or like, Jonathan Mann does his song-a-day challenge, and Loading Ready Run started with the goal of one short comedy video per week. I could see a band setting themselves the challenge of one music video per week.
posted by RobotHero at 7:06 PM on May 20, 2015