The video revolution – Looks aren’t everything; they’re the only thing (III)

The reality is that in the past two decades, video has become a major part of the promotion and artist development process. “We want to break new acts and sustain important artists,” noted MTV’s COO and president Michael J. Wolf in 2005. “MTV is a juggernaut. MTV today is different from MTV 36 months ago.”

Despite this ever-changing landscape, MTV has consistently helped to sell records. In its early days, it built the careers of acts like Jane’s addiction and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers were made by MTV. Temple of the Dog sold over a million copies of its album two years after its release, due to delayed video exposure. The band’s record company attributed most of the album’s success to MTV. Bottom line – an artist that can look and sound compelling on MTV will sell records.

Note the artist does not necessarily need to look good, just compelling in one way or another. No one would call Kid Rock one of the beautiful people, but he has a persona that translates very well into video. Billy Joel’s older clips and even Elton John’s more recent videos remain stalwarts on VH-1, MTV’s sister channel, capitalizing on their long careers, and established personas.

However, there came a time when videos alone could not bring in the increased ratings MTV needed to sustain the business. So the channel split into several channels. Now there’s the original MTV, which has become more of a lifestyle channel than a music channel. There’s the aforementioned VH-1, which skews toward the aging original audience of MTV, as MTV still stays targeted at teens and tweens. MTV-2 picked up the musical slack.

In all, many cable and/or satellite systems have half a dozen music channels associated with MTV, and several independent, more specialized video outlets like Fuse, CMT, and Much Music. MTV may no longer directly stand for Music Television, but a dozen other channels continue to rely on videos for their core programming, and the record companies continue to fund the creation of the clips that feed them.

As MTV became the “juggernaut” Wolf describes, if an act had any chance of achieving any kind of buzz, it had to have a video. After payola, this is one of the most expensive lines on most artists’ ledgers, including indie artists. The budgets of the videos tend to reflect their importance in the artist’s overall financial picture, a cost-to-reward ratio that, if not necessarily scientific, is the result of experienced intuition on the part of the record company. An independently distributed heavy metal act might have a budget of between $2,500 and $6,000 to spend on a video. A video for a large-budget album or major-selling artist could still cost upwards of a million dollars, although as the record business has contracted so have the budgets.

In 1981, a major video might have cost $15,000. By 1984, as MTV became a proven selling tool and the stakes got higher, so did the video budgets, which averaged out at about $50,000 - $60,000. Four years later, that range had risen another $10,000, and through the 1990s, that generally fell in the $60,000 - $80,000 range. These days, a video for a major record company might run anywhere from $10,000 to $250,000; the average is around $40,000.

This cut in available funds is a circumstance that some directors find very frustrating. “You do music videos, you deal with certain budgets,” Nispel said. “Usually they don’t allow you, at least the budgets that I’m still having, to go over two days of shooting.”