Music Videos? I Want My YouTube!

Here’s a great article on the impact of  music videos on YouTube:

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Published: August 22, 2013

A LOT has changed since 1984, when MTV first televised the Video Music Awards. Thirty years ago, record labels often spent millions of dollars on videos by top directors to promote the sale of albums. Then label executives would submit the videos to MTV and pray that the network would put them in its rotation.

Along with their disc-jockey counterparts on FM radio, the gatekeepers at MTV and rival channels like VH1 could make or break a song.

Not anymore. These days the Internet is the medium for music videos, and legions of music fans surfing the Net determine if a video becomes popular: YouTube, not MTV, is the platform.

It has supplanted radio as the main way American teenagers listen to new music, a survey by Nielsen shows. So musicians and directors angle to invent striking films with the potential to go viral, even as their production budgets have shrunk.

On Sunday night at 9, when MTV’s awards show is broadcast live from Barclays Center in Brooklyn for the first time, it will celebrate an art form that seemed to be in decline a decade ago but, directors say, has undergone a renaissance in recent years with the rise of YouTube and broadband connections. This change in medium has subtly altered the aesthetics of videos, too, freeing directors to take more risks.

The videos are more important than ever to the marketing of bands, label executives say, with directors constantly looking for some trick — a comic idea, a clever bit of storytelling, a dose of sexual titillation or a shocking image — to attract attention and persuade millions of people to watch the video repeatedly. A wildly popular video on YouTube, besides generating an additional stream of revenue for labels from ads that precede videos, often persuades radio programmers to champion a song, which in turn spurs sales of albums and singles, music executives say.

Though MTV continues to show videos on some of its channels, like MTV Jams and MTV Hits, it is now the YouTube hit that labels covet: hundreds of millions of views translates into a steady surge in album sales.

“We are in a true video revolution,” said David Saslow, the general manager of Atlantic Records, which has a nominee for video of the year in “Locked Out of Heaven” by Bruno Mars. Video, Mr. Saslow explained, has “almost never been as important as it is now, because if YouTube is the stereo of the day, when you go there, there needs to be a compelling and artful reason to stay there.”

Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Records, Taylor Swift’s label, echoed Mr. Saslow’s point. “You put a flag up and say, ‘Hey, we are here,’ but you’d better have something compelling enough that it does go viral.” He said the old model, with MTV executives force-feeding the public a playlist, “has completely flipped 180 degrees.”

Stephen Friedman, the president of MTV, said that this year, longer cinematic pieces seem to be in vogue. “The story telling and the visual complexity is dazzling,” he said. “It’s ambitious in a way we don’t always get.”

Of the five videos nominated for video of the year, the one most viewed on YouTube, “Thrift Shop,” by the Seattle rap duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, cost the least to make, $15,000. Yet its comic tone and absurd images jump-started the career of these artists, persuading radio programmers to champion their song.

Another nominee for top video, “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke, went viral online because its original version featured nearly nude female models prancing around a nattily dressed Mr. Thicke. That blatantly risqué ploy helped Mr. Thicke earn the first No. 1 pop hit of his two-decade career.

Two other nominees — Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors“ and Ms. Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble“ — are expensive and lengthy cinematic pieces by arty directors, one telling the story of a lifelong love with surreal imagery, the other depicting a disastrous affair in flashbacks. Mr. Mars’s video, by contrast, focuses on a live performance, a throwback to an older style.

In the Internet age, a viral video can advance a career, even without radio play. Psy’s “Gangnam Style” video made him a star outside South Korea before American stations started spinning the song. Many indie bands, like Atlas Genius, have been signed by labels on the strength of low-budget videos.

Along with the deft use of Twitter and Facebook accounts, YouTube videos have become critical to creating a band’s image.

“It’s all part of the business card, if you will,” said Jeff Rabhan, the chairman of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University. “It’s the music, it’s the image, it’s the video. That’s the band’s calling card.”

Directors speak of lower budgets but greater artistic freedom. They are no longer restricted to a three-minute format, nor do they need to worry about obscenity rules.

“Now we are on the Internet, and there are no rules, it can be real art,” said Anthony Mandler, who directed Ms. Swift’s video. For her song, Mr. Mandler went with a five-minute video that begins with a long soliloquy from Ms. Swift before the music starts, then features dozens of dark, fast cuts depicting flashbacks to an ugly affair with a cad.

Diane Martel, the director of Mr. Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” said record labels were exerting less control over the video content than they did in the 1990s. “I am free to make work I have a lot of control over,” she said. “At the top of the chain, you don’t have people trying to curate complicated, thoughtful work.”

Ms. Martel said the choice to use topless actresses in the first version of “Blurred Lines” was an example of that latitude: nudity is no longer off-limits. Interscope, Mr. Thicke’s label, never blinked at the idea, she said. Though the video has been criticized as misogynist, Ms. Martel said she wanted to portray the women as using the power of their physical beauty to mock the clothed male singers. She had them look with disdain at the camera.

“It’s a romp; it’s for adults,” she said. “They are actually ridiculing the men. It’s hysterical.”

Still, Ms. Martel and Mr. Thicke, knowing the nude version would most likely be pulled from YouTube and be available only on Vevo, made a second version, with the models in skimpy clothes. It is that version that is nominated for video of the year.

Philip Andelman, a director whose video for Duck Sauce’s “It’s You“ is nominated for best visual effects, said videos centered on a band simply playing a song are becoming scarcer. More directors, like Mr. Mandler and Floria Sigismondi, who made Mr. Timberlake’s video, are trying to tell stories. Some recent videos leave the band out altogether and use the song as the soundtrack for a short film with no dialogue.

Cameron Duddy, a director of Mr. Mars’s “Locked Out of Heaven,” said he pitched the singer on several wacky story lines. His previous viral video with Mr. Mars, for “The Lazy Song,” was a low-budget lark, featuring five men in chimp masks dancing with the singer in his bedroom. (It has had 411 million views.)

In the end, however, Mr. Mars wanted to present a hard-rocking image and opted for a grainy performance video. He and his backing band performed the song live dozens of times, playing along with the recorded track, so Mr. Duddy could capture the feel of a live performance. It was filmed on an old VHS camera, like a DIY punk video from the early 1980s.

“He wanted it to feel as if someone’s dad filmed it,” Mr. Duddy said.

Perhaps no video in the last year did more for a group than “Thrift Shop.” Shot on the cheap in Seattle at various thrift stores, the video became a viral hit on the Internet before the song started to climb the charts on FM radio. That success persuaded many station programmers to add it to their playlists and drove sales of singles, said Zach Quillen, manager of Macklemore & Ryan Lewis.

“We spent zero dollars to market that video,” Mr. Quillen said. “The music video was a commercial for the band.”

Mr. Rabhan of the Clive Davis Institute said: “If a video goes viral online, that will get you on the radio, and it used to be the radio that drove the message. What it speaks to over all is the notion that there really are no longer gatekeepers. MTV is not the gatekeeper. Record companies are not the gatekeeper. Fans decide what they want and like, and if they so choose, radio will follow, and sales will follow.”