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.