Music in the Air, part 2

Why should your favorite band have to hire you if you want to create a video for your favorite song?

Fan-created videos are nothing new. Some people have been doing it for a long time. Some bands have actively encouraged it, going so far as to hold fan video competitions. I think fan-created videos - and I don't mean photo montages or an iPhone recording of a concert - should be a huge part of the musical landscape. I really feel that, if things were right, fan videos would be every bit as important as artist-created videos.

There are a few gotchas with this. The big one is intellectual property (IP), a horrible plague of mindless litigation that does little more than stifle culture (to be clear, I draw a line between copyright - which was originally designed to reasonably protect creators and publishers - and IP which is an unfettered, nebulous concept aimed at protecting wealth at whatever cost). I learned some things about music licensing with the 52 Weeks Project and I'm applying them to my next project - one that combines my loves of film, music, and technology.

In August I'll be unveilng a new website focused on user-generated music video content. There will be more details with the launch, but for now I'll end by asking the question I started this post with in a different way:

If your ability to make a video for your favorite song were set free, what would that video be?

Music in the Air, part 1

Does anybody else miss old-school MTV? I don't mean TRL and I don't mean the first season of Real World. I mean old school like Friday Night Video Fights. Early 80s a bit long ago for you? Well then how about Headbanger's Ball? I was working the other night and listening to Pandora when Iron Maiden's song "The Clairvoyant" came on. I remember when I was in 6th grade (for the second time - I didn't get much out of formal education even then) and a buddy handed me some videotapes with episodes of Headbanger's ball on them. This is where I really got introduced to bands that have been with me ever since - Maiden, Priest, Ozzy (this was a couple years before Metallica broke down and made their first video for "One").

Music has always been an important part of my life and back then it was all about videos. Things went wrong somewhere and MTV became less important for music fans (while Apple Computer became more important - go figure). Videos still exist but they're hardly the promotional vehicles they once were. It's odd to me that with the ubiquity of media today - particularly video - that video is not a huge part of how we experience music anymore. The opposite should be true. Music videos shouldn't just be something played on TV screens in bars or in clothing stores. They shouldn't have to be something you go searching for on YouTube. 

The art and business of music videos deserves more attention. But in order to do that the art and business of music videos have to do some catching up with the 21st Century. I've got some ideas about how to do that and in the coming weeks I'll be revealing them and talking about what I'm personally doing about it.

Stay tuned people.

A Word About Music and Licensing

Music has always been an important storytelling tool for movie makers. I'm not just talking about a score here. A score is a great thing because it is focused and tuned in to the emotional heartbeat of the moment. It engages the audience to believe in the world being built on screen and can enhance the performance being delivered. But a musical soundtrack is important as well. I know that in recent years the soundtrack has become more and more involved in the marketing of a movie - which I don't always see as a bad thing - but in the post-MTV era, musical montage is simply a part of our cultural thinking. While the worst case of this might be the latest jock rock hit playing on the new episode of some CW teen drama, the best case is something like "The Graduate," which just wouldn't be the same movie without Simon and Garfunkle.

When it comes to the 52 Weeks Project, stories I'm trying to tell in less than 3 minutes, a good song in the background  is important(or the foreground since there's generally no sound shooting Super 8). And, though I've done it before, and there are quite a few gems to be found, I don't want to spend a lot of time combing through Creative Commons libraries to find a song that kinda-sorta fits. I want to use songs that I know and love and have influenced who I am, how I think, and therefore the movies I make. I also want something the audience can identify with. This became abundantly clear while editing the first 52WP film when I put a great Guns n' Roses song under the video as a temporary track. It was really the ideal song for the film and I didn't want to take it off.

So I did some homework.

ASCAP, who license most music and have a huge repertory of licensable songs, apparently has a new media license that, all things considered, is quite reasonable. It may not be the right fit for every film project, but given that the main venue for these movies is going to be my website and I can measure how much gets played, it works out. It does somewhat limit me in terms of distribution (of course I can re-license appropriately if my needs change) and there is a little cost involved, but these facts are totally outweighed by the fact that for these 52 movies (and anything else only on my website, such as perhaps a web-only reel) I can use "real" songs (for lack of a better term). And the expense? Well, considering I'm not making any money, I'd have to get somewhere above half a million views for it to cost me much more than film, processing, and transfer for just 4 of these films. In other words it'll work out to about $5.50 a movie for the year. 

There's kind of an ethical point in this too. I could rant all day against the intellectually bankrupt concepts of intellectual property that we hold in this country and around the world, but I've always held that if the business models evolved to something reasonable we should support them. ASCAP notes that this new media license of theirs is an experimental license. I can already see ways in which it could use improvement (or perhaps I don't yet understand every aspect of it), but I do see an effort to be reasonable and I'm happy to work with it.

(Photo courtesy Flickr user Almogaver)