Research & Planning: Research into the music industry

Pre-production

The first stage of creating a music video is to choose a production company who the artist believes are the best for the song. They may receive offers from several companies, but they will generally choose the most suited company or one that has done that genre of song already. They have to choose a suitable one as they are responsible for hiring the crew and finding the locations.

At this stage a story board is made for the whole plan for the video, from this filming starts to take place.

Production

Sometimes more crew are needed to be hired to help with the production of the video, when this is done, filming can commence. The video is filmed hundreds of times to get the perfect shot and extra scenes are also filmed that might not even make the final cut. Sometimes stills will also be taken for posters and album art and such.

Post Production

This is the final stage where a video is editing and put together this is generally done in a studio with an extremely powerful and expensive computer to handle the large file sizes. This is expensive software and is a skill that can be expensive to pay for, along with the fact it can take several weeks means it can be the most expensive part of creating the video. The video is then generally sent to the company where they deal with the distribution such as discs, iTunes and YouTube.

Why do artists create music videos?

The bottom line is money. It is a business and it has to make money and with millions of downloads and sales large artists make millions. Smaller singers/songwriters may create videos and upload them to YouTube because they find enjoyment, passion and they want to show off what they can do.

How do audiences access music videos?

• The internet

Music can be brought, listened to and illegally downloaded on a countless number of websites; this is easy to access and available to almost everyone.

• YouTube

YouTube is a way to watch music videos for free, they are generally uploaded by a company such as Vevo who monetise the video and make a healthy profit, an average ratio is 1$ every 1000 views from adverts played before the video. This means a video with 10 million views will make $10,000

• TV

Music videos are showed on TV channels such as capital that will again run adverts in between music videos, making a decent amount of money. Along with this some songs are brought for use in adverts such as ‘Jungle’ being used on the ‘Amazon’ advert. This raises the profile of the song and people tend to download more of the song.

• Radio

Songs are again played with adverts this again benefits both the artist and radio company as it raises awareness of the song and people download more of the song on websites such as iTunes.

• ITunes/Google play store

ITunes are download websites that charge for the song directly benefiting the artists, the company will take a cut but this will be a huge way of creating revenue.

• CDs

CDs are one of the oldest ways to distribute music but can still bring in large amounts of money, the record company will generally create a CD of the album and sell it to physical stores such as HMV who will sell the song as a physical copy for you to keep. This is generally the most expensive way to consume the media in question.