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Music Video Production

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Designing the Music Business

Part of the book series: Music Business Research ((MUBURE))

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Abstract

This chapter concerns contemporary music video production and outlines how musicians over the last decade perceive changes in the ways in which they produce and use music videos. Through reflections on my involvement in the production of Australian musician Emma Louise’s music video for her song ‘Mirrors’ (2013), as well as a digital ethnographic study of 60 music videos that Jefferton James directed between 2012 and 2018, this chapter builds on the work of Caston and Smith (Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 11:1–9, 2017) who argued that music video production has a hybrid production culture that emerged from the coming together of graphic design, specifically album cover and gig poster design, portrait photography, televised live concert performance and fine art.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Concept clips are also known as ‘narrative videos’.

  2. 2.

    Zoey Black was known on the call sheet as ‘dancer 1’ and unfortunately I cannot remember ‘dancer 2’s’ name. I know that this is ironic given this chapter’s discussion of the lack of attribution for music video director and producer teams on YouTube, but alas, despite my best efforts, I have not been able to find her name.

  3. 3.

    When the word treatment is used in the music video business, it refers to the script for a music video. The treatment contains the basic idea or ‘high concept’ for the production and it is often a one-page document that includes visual images, which may form a storyboard, and also web links to other music videos, short films, advertisements, and so on that are used as references.

  4. 4.

    While at the time Jefferton owned a Canon Mark III camera, for higher budget video shoots we would often hire additional equipment such as a Blackmagic Design URSA Mini Pro 4.6 K EF camera and additional lenses, stands, lighting equipment, dollys and sliders, microphones, etc. from hire equipment suppliers for the photographic and film industry such as The Front (2019) in Sydney’s inner-west.

  5. 5.

    Regarding the lyrical meaning of the song, Emma noted: ‘I guess this song is a cowardly way to say, stay away from my man … I imagined my cat back arched while I hissed these lyrics behind a microphone’ (Louise 2013a).

  6. 6.

    Tobias Jesso Jr produced the album.

  7. 7.

    Caston and Smith (2017, p. 1) specifically point out that music video is a ‘hidden screen industry’ that has been neglected in taxpayer-funded research into the creative and cultural industries in the UK.

  8. 8.

    There are some (now quite dated) ‘how to’ books about making videos. Schwartz’s (2007) Making music videos focuses on the technical and managerial skills that producers and directors need, while Hanson’s (2006) Reinventing music video: Next-generation directors, their inspiration and work is now over 11 years old. This book contrasts with this literature because it is a research-based monograph.

  9. 9.

    Kasey Chambers is an Australian country singer–songwriter who has released 12 studio albums to date. Coming from a musical family, she achieved cross-over success from the Australian country music scene to the mainstream pop music scene in Australia with her album The captain in 1999. She has a large audience in the USA and is one of the most well-known female musicians in Australia (Chambers 2019).

  10. 10.

    The lyrics for the song were also included in the original treatment for this video. Despite an attempt to obtain permission to reproduce them here, unfortunately the cost to do so exceeded the amount I had allocated in the budget of the publication subsidy grant I obtained from the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne to produce this book. A Google search on 18 November 2019, however, revealed that the lyrics were available on various websites.

  11. 11.

    A behind-the-scenes video that accompanied the release of Chambers’ video ‘Is God real?’ is available (Chambers 2015a).

  12. 12.

    For example, a video made for Danielle Deckard entitled Sleep has since been made private on YouTube despite the video originally being premiered by Frankie magazine (Deckard 2015). Likewise, the videos that Jefferton directed for Australian country music star Morgan Evans are currently ‘unlisted’ on YouTube. I assume that this is because Evans is now achieving global success and his current management want to make him look fresh and so have unlisted his older videos. This is despite the fact that his 2014 ‘Best I never had’ video was shot across a 19-hour shoot day, as evidenced by the behind-the-scenes video (Evans 2015b). It was not until 2018 that Morgan became one of Billboard’s ‘2018 Country Artists to Watch’, and his global hit song ‘Kiss somebody’ achieved the number 1 spot on the US Country Chart (Forum Melbourne 2019). He has also achieved platinum sales status in Australia (70,000), and has tallied 66 million streams on Spotify as at 23 September 2019 (Forum Melbourne 2019).

  13. 13.

    There may be a number of reasons for this. For example, typically major labels have more staff who may be enlisted to upload the videos to YouTube and they may not know who the directors are, or care who they are. Major labels also typically pay more for the videos to be made, whereas independent labels and artists are more likely to credit the director and producer teams in an attempt to intrinsically motivate them to work with them again. However, these are just guesses, and further research would be needed to determine the actual reasons for this difference in how these different types of labels credit, or do not credit, the director and producer teams on YouTube.

  14. 14.

    I am using the word success here to mean commercial success.

  15. 15.

    £7,000 converts to AU$12,822.80 as on 26 September 2019; however, this does not take inflation into account.

  16. 16.

    £250,000 converts to AU$457,925.00 as on 26 September 2019; however, this does not take inflation into account.

  17. 17.

    An advance from a record label is called an ‘advance’ because it is literally the future royalties from sales given to the musician or band in advance. Record labels, at least in the past, have typically provided musicians and bands recoupable advances for the purpose of making music videos.

  18. 18.

    Donavan here is referring to OK Go, a US rock band from Chicago, Illinois, and specifically the band’s quirky and elaborate one-take music video for their song ‘Here it goes again’. This a low-budget video featuring the band members dancing on treadmills in a gym. The video had a large impact (OK Go 2009).

  19. 19.

    The fact that Donavan is referring to a budget range of AU$15,000 to AU$25,000 whereas Jefferton disclosed that the budget range of the 60 videos outlined in the digital ethnography above was AU$1000 to AU$10,000 suggests that Jefferton James was positioned as a lower cost option within the music video business over the last ten years.

  20. 20.

    Donavan is referring to the album release cycle here which has traditionally been a two-year cycle, i.e. the band writes and records the album for a year and then tours and promotes it for a year. While the digitisation of the music business may have shortened this cycle, by ‘in cycle’ Donavan is simply referring to the promotional/touring phase of the album cycle.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Guy Morrow

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  1. Guy Morrow
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Correspondence to Guy Morrow .

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Morrow, G. (2020). Music Video Production. In: Designing the Music Business. Music Business Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48114-8_5

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