Remember when MTV and MuchMusic played music videos ? Ya, us either.
No one wants to admit they're old.
But full disclosure - we do remember, and it was awesome.
You'd come home from school and turn on the tv and wait anxiously, hoping they'd play the video you wanna see. 1979 by the Smashing Pumpkins please.
Maybe you'd stay up late for Headbangers Ball or The Wedge and get introduced to something you'd never heard of before. They were good times for music, and good times for fans of music.
Apparently not good times for the networks though, as they decided 18 hours of Ridiculousness was a better way of banking ad dollars.
So what's the point of music videos today ?
There's no big, commercial gatekeeper, deciding who gets added into rotation, there's no chart countdowns, no consensus arbiter of what's cool. We're left with the democracy of YouTube, for better and worse.
Videos are like recordings - if you can make 'em, you can put 'em out. Just hit that upload button. But just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Or..should you.
If a song drops in the forest without a video, does anybody hear it ?
I don't think it ever does anymore.
Even if it's not a real video, there's probably a visualizer or a lyric video or whatever term you wanna use for 'something to watch while you listen'.
There's value in moving images, but there's also value in using them to tell a story.
Every aspect of what you do as a musician should be helping to tell the story of your song, your record, and most importantly, the story of you as an artist.
Not everyone has a big budget or a crew of talented friends moonlighting as film directors after they finish at Starbucks, but everybody has a camera in their pocket more powerful than whatever they used to make indie videos 25 years ago that actually got played on TV.
There's no excuses for not making the best video content you can, on whatever platform you can. Don't do it to chase likes, or views, or your share of the TikTok creator fund, but do it to help tell the story of why you do what you do in the first place.
The world wants to see you. They've had enough Ridiculousness.
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