10 Year Challenge: Music Videos – Then and Now
What’s going on in music videos? Chances are you’ve seen everyone’s ten-year challenge circulating the web, your timelines, on Insta, Twitter, Facebook, everywhere! But I wanted to take that concept and talk about the ten-year difference in this crazy world of entertainment we live in. If you are a millennial like me, then you straddled both the bloom in technology and the instant gratification era we live in today. If you work in entertainment like me, you notice the shifts and the way things are nowadays compared to years past.
Music Videos Ten Years Ago
In the 2000s, music videos were prime promotional tools to drive ticket sales. Promoting that kind of content required either massive studio time or extensive set times shooting on-site.
For On time Elite this meant having four to six buses at a time for days on end.
When a megawatt like Madonna or a powerhouse like Diddy would shoot you’d have a unit to operate a seldom thing, may that be hair, wardrobe, entourage, lounging area between takes, this was just the production process. Post-production meant editing and bringing the video to its fruition. MTV, VH1, Fuse and many others produced the content that you watched.
These platforms released music vids all day round. Keep in mind the more you watch the more com it generates. May that be from concert sales from tickets to merch or the buying of advertisers within our fav music vids. Let’s not even mention what these videos featured. Ten years ago artist would feature an I – pod which at the time retailed at $399. Like in 50- Cents P.I.M.P video:
And that’s one of the low-budget items. Companies would showcase everything from Gator shoes to expensive cars in the content we would watch. The videos also played a major key role in the selling of records/ cds. Or Lady Gaga’s – Bad Romance Video that led the way to the blow-up of BEATS, which Apple absorbed some time ago.
Label – Streamline; Kohlive; CherryTree; Interscope
Where are the funk and the flex?
The internet changed the way artists and production companies create music videos.
What was once possible days on set just filming has now become a huge wave of constant content.
Cd’s were price 10 years ago and then out of thin air the advent of music downloads in the early 2000s and the introduction of the iTunes Music Store in 2003, the CD decreased in popularity yearly as music downloads experienced rapid growth.
The convenience of music downloads in combination with digital audio players like Apple’s iPod leaves little reason to keep CDs and a CD player. Although CDs still control the market for music, we are not using them as a medium to store digital data since the introduction of DVDs in the early 2000s.
We are now a combination of consumption and mass media absorption. With subscription plans to Spotify, I-Tunes, Sound Cloud, and many more which provide us with audio stimulation. Do we really see music vids anymore?
TODAY
Nowadays, we all have access to stimulation, both audio and visual. It is at our fingertips… literally, the smarter our phones become, the more access we have. This is a topic all its own, so I will stay on this one. Music Videos are still wildly relevant, but there has been a change. While they remained dormant for a few years, as a society, we believe in comebacks, and baby… music videos are BACK!
Here in New York we split between studios and shooting on location, but from our end of things, it is a combination of the two.
The New York city streets serve as stages and the studios for effects. We work hand in hand with studio houses to create modern day vids. The shift being the number of units on one site.
We won’t see 5-8 units on a site. Since we are working with studios, there are built-in quarters for talent. What we do serve as are the hubs in which producers and directors work from to connect feeds directly as they are shot. We’ve now become the editing room, which puts us in the middle of all the actions as opposed to seating and lounging on the sidelines.
Now that is what our main purpose is but we do still serve as talent hubs. We will remain a constant, our purposes just change. That being said, after sets, after editing, music videos have now returned and are at full force. Their purpose is now veered more to the artistic vision than it is to the subliminal push of new products. Of course it’s not to say that won’t still be a recurrence (money to be made folks) but we can sleep sound in knowing that although music videos went to sleep for a bit they have made a triumphant return.