MUSIC now is VISUAL
This is all you need to remember when creating a music video, before Michael Jackson released Thriller, music had no face and it was all about the voice, the sound, the instruments…
Now, with the amount of daily use of social media your music has more than one image, all your social medias are representing your music and you have to adapt to it, post everywhere and unless you are extremely lucky on Spotify and listeners only care about your sound, you, like the rest of the planet will end up having to do music videos.
Don’t take it as a bad thing, this is quite a cool part of being a musician and it can help develop more ways to reach people and make your fandom fall in love but then… Youtube happens… The real Fan test is people watching your video without you having to sneak around buying views from shady places.
This is why we’re going to exactly explain why some music videos work… while others don’t.
What Not to do in Music Videos?
Before going with what to do, is important we discuss what NOT to do:
- Each frame must be art, plastic bottles, logos in clothing or around the background etc… must be out. Unless sponsoring a brand on purpose you always must wear Logo-Free Clothing. No movie out there promotes brands for free, you are an artist so neither do you.
- Don’t pretend to be what you are not. This is really typical mistake inside the Rap and Hip Hop community. You are not famous, you don’t have to rent a car and have 12 women twerking around you like some famous Rappers. Those who do it get exactly the opposite result. People dislike music videos where artists pretends to be rich and famous.
- Don’t complex your video in a non-sense way. Videos must have a connection between parts of the song, a video with no connection or story behind it is just a mess and will be disliked by the audience.
- Don’t record your video in a low quality, shake the camera and don’t do disrespectful things if it’s not connected to the story. Why? Because it backslash at you, for starters FB and IG won’t promote and will block videos with sexual, violence or aggressive content.
- Guns and Nudity is DEFINITELY not needed, this keeps happening and videos keep getting blocked. Don’t destroy your chances for trying to look like others.
What does a music video has to connect with the audience?
- A story that connects. There are millions ways to show this, if your video has a story, people tend to watch longer time than a video without it.
- Few frames with the artist singing, this is easy to understand, we want to see the artists singing during the song, but not the whole song.
- When recording, get the highest quality possible, never less than 1080p, the ideal would be 2K quality.
- Properly fit the song with the cuts, transitions and lip sync. If a song and a video are perfectly cut and connected, the feeling will be way bigger.
- Add a letterbox (the black lines above and under the video) This gives a cinematic look and make your video special compared to your social media vids.
- Get cinematic moments in your video, try to get epic shots!
A perfect example of all this will be always:
