One of the (many) things I’ve been doing over the last few years is commissioning music videos, for smaller (and more interesting) indie labels. 
Needless to say I haven’t been overly busy with that part of my ‘business’. The music video as we knew it no longer does the promo job it was invented for. MTV and the likes don’t play many music videos, so not-so-rich bands aren’t keen to make the high-risk investment. Instead, YouTube has become the new holy grail for record labels and their commissioners. 

What’s interesting to see is that labels, who have traditionally been quite averse to embracing internet technology are now realising the digital potential. Big time. Major label commissioner Tim Nash (who won the award for Best commissioner at the recent UK Music video Awards) writes a very entertaining blog about his lovely job and gave an insight in how they deal with the ‘Truth Tube’ and how they’re analyzing the viewing behaviour and the tagging of their videos. Turns out that 52 seconds is the average ’switch-off moment’.

As a fan of creative music videos and with quite a few talented directors in my close circle of friends, my heart breaks and weeps when I read this. It’s scary to see how the big corporations are desperately trying to take the risk and failure out of what we always believed to be a creative industry. Sure, from a commercial point of view you can sort of understand them, but we can only hope that the stats don’t get applied to each and every band.

My prediction is that music videos will become similar to tv commercials. They’re no longer the sine qua non of advertising, but for washing powder (read: hits! hits! hits!) it’ll still work. And for the more aspirational brands (read: more creative artists), the future of ‘music marketing’ will move more towards inventive campaigns like the Oasis one I wrote about before, highly creative material (video, websites,…) that translates the creativity of an artist and personal communication like blogs and documentaries/video blogs that give an insight in the wonderful world of musicians.

So here’s to a creative 09.