The download divide
Mariah Carey's 1999 music video "Heartbreaker" was something of a landmark in its genre. Made by "Rush Hour" film director Brett Ratner, it included an animated segment, multiple dance sequences and a fight scene between two characters - both played by Ms. Carey. It cost at least $1.7 million to produce, according to a person familiar with the project (Sony, Ms. Carey's label at the time, declines to comment), but helped sell about seven million copies of Ms. Carey's album world-wide.
Ms. Carey's recent video, "Don't Forget About Us", has no special effects or action scenes. Made with a budget of less than $600,000, according to people familiar with the project, it primarily shows closeups of Ms. Carey lounging in various poses as she lip-syncs the song.
From cellphones to Internet streams, see where music videos are playing now. Plus, watch three videos that bucked the formula for a popular music video and are getting buzz online. The music-video genre should be experiencing a renaissance now. After years of being pushed off MTV and VH1 in favor of reality shows, videos are once again easy to find. Fans can download them on iTunes, watch them on music Web sites or play them on mobile phones. But just as these options are exploding, record companies are cutting video budgets. The result is a new generation of videos that some fans say are a far cry from the lavish productions of past years.
Most music videos today are made for less than $150,000, according to music-industry professionals - a significant drop from a typical video budget in the late 1990s, about $700,000. And the products are nowhere near some of the big-budget spectacles that helped define the genre. Michael Jackson's "Thriller", made in 1983 for the then-unheard-of cost of about $800,000, remains one of the most popular downloads on iTunes today.
Lately, however, musicians and music-video directors have been making do with less. For his last video, rock star Marilyn Manson was given a budget of about $200,000 - significantly less than many of his videos of the late 1990s. Director Nathan Cox met with Mr. Manson before shooting to discuss possible concepts, but Mr. Manson's suggestions were all too costly. The end result was a relatively simple montage of Mr. Manson singing in front of a backdrop of political images. "It would have been the most brilliant Manson video ever made," Mr. Cox says, "But we didn't have the budget for the most brilliant Manson video ever made."
To be sure, some of the biggest stars still command large video budgets. While "Don't Forget About Us" had a relatively modest budget for Ms. Carey, another of her recent videos, "Say Somethin'" had a budget of around $1 million, according to people familiar with the project, partly due to filming on-location in Paris. Still, even this budget was well below some of Ms. Carey's biggest productions of the 1990s.
While budgets are dropping, labels are now earning new revenues from videos. Until recently, record companies gave away videos free to channels like MTV, using them as promotional tools for their artists. Last summer, however, labels began demanding licensing fees for videos shown on Internet sites like AOL Music and Yahoo Music. When videos were introduced on iTunes in the fall, labels arranged to receive about $1.40 for every video sold for $1.99. The Recording Industry Association of America estimates that sales of music-video downloads amounted to $3.7 million in 2005. The number is expected to grow in 2006, with the proliferation of video iPods and video cellphones.
"We're no longer making commercials for albums. We're generating saleable content," says director Chris Milk, who has made videos for acts like rapper Kanye West and rock band Audioslave. Record labels say they've cut music-video budgets for several reasons. One is across-the-board belt-tightening. Labels have now faced several years of declining sales, hurt by piracy and the rise of music downloads online.
But music executives also say the big video budgets of the 1990s are generally unnecessary, now that videos are most often watched on small screens like laptops and video iPods. Reality TV programming and the success of amateur "viral" videos that viewers watch and email to friends have changed the expectations of young viewers, says Monte Lipman, president of Universal Republic Records. Better and less expensive video technology has also helped keep costs down. And a big budget doesn't guarantee wide TV exposure. "For every video you'd see on MTV, there were 10 more that didn't make the cut, and that adds up to millions," Mr. Lipman says.
Instead, labels often now focus on creating Internet-friendly clips that could take off as viral videos. They reduce budgets by shortening shooting schedules, using young directors hungry for work and often filming bands in front of a green screens, so that settings can be added later, rather than filming in multiple locations. "I can say that a lot more of the money is going into low-fi production," says Michael Nash, Warner Music's senior vice president of digital strategy.
Directors, producers and musicians have responded to changing music video landscape in a variety of ways. Some have modified their production routines. Hype Williams, a music-video director best known for his big-budget videos for hip-hop stars like Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes, says he's reduced his typical video crew from about 40 members to about a dozen in recent years. He also now designs his videos to be watchable on small screens like video iPods. "In the last four months, it's all been close-ups," he says. "You have to think like that now."
Mr. Williams, who once spent almost $1 million constructing a faux mansion in the style of "Citizen Kane" in a New York shipyard for a video for singer R. Kelly, recently was given a $400,000 budget for a video for rapper Lil Jon. He filmed the rapper in front of a green screen.
Some in the industry feel that the Internet video revolution is leaving them out in the cold. Music-video directors, who typically collect 10% of a video's budget, don't receive a cut from video downloads on iTunes or from Internet licensing fees. A group called the Music Video Directors Alliance is lobbying for royalties for directors.
Musicians are coping in their own ways. Concerned about the difficulty of getting wide play on TV, the rock band Death Cab for Cutie also pursued another route. The band commissioned videos for all 11 songs on its album from a range of directors, each with a budget under $10,000. None of the videos showed the band members. The collection is being sold on DVD and iTunes. "In exchange for small budgets, we gave the directors full creative control," says the band's bass player, Nick Harmer. (The Wall Street Journal)
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