What I have found is that you do not need to be, “serious rockers, famous artists, or singers with money to burn,” in order to make a music video. In fact I have over 32 of them on my youtube channel and did not spend a single dime making any one of them. Of course, most of them are lo-fi as I only recently acquired an HD video camera, but still, they are imaginative, fun, and a good way to add dimension and interest to my music.

Before the internet and affordable, user-friendly, compact, professional recording hardware, most of us Indie musicians spent our days (and mostly nights) playing bars and parties, dreaming of being discovered and signed to a major label, and maybe scraping up enough cash to cut a few tracks or print up a few posters in order to effect a tiny fraction of publicity that the internet provides for free.

On the internet, indie musicians have at their fingertips music publishing, A&R development, radio play, fund raising, video/audio broadcasting, merchandising, fan newsletters, copyright management, CD/Vinyl manufacturing services, music lessons, band networking, music stores to sell your music, and all kinds of other related services that are being added to every day. What is more, utilizing online promotional tools and streaming media, musicians are reaching out to potential fans all over the world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year without doing anything but uploading their music. Welcome to the age of independent music. We have finally arrived.

My band recently released our first music video as well. I wanted to share my experiences here and hopefully it’ll be valuable to some of you who are about to attempt this endeavor.

I definitely agree about determining the goal of the music video ahead of time. But after that, I don’t want anyone to get discouraged if they can’t collaborate with others on the video in any way! Our goal was extremely simple: show people how we looked and sounded. That’s it! Just trying to capture our “image/brand.” Just nice shots edited in a nice way of the singer singing and the band jamming. We’re from South Louisiana, so we took advantage of the scenery fully. All the shots are outdoors: from the singing, to the jamming, to the b-roll footage.

There was no money needed to get any of these shots. Just use what you already have in the most creative way. (Like the mountain climbing scene in the music video in this article) Other people will find where you’re from interesting, no matter where that is!

Other points I agree with is the marketing and building up to the release! This point cannot be stressed enough!! We posted a different thumbnail from the video footage with how many days were left until the release date each day on our Facebook. This was an interesting way to build up hype and provide multimedia content for our fans. After the release date, you must still non-stop promote that shite! This is something I’m still learning in particular. No one else is going to market for you if you are just starting out. We got a group of our most loyal friends and fans (our marketing team), and stormed Facebook with news about the release for days. Now, use common sense, and do this in a tasteful and relevant manner. Planning for the future, this is one area that I’m going to specifically pay more attention to.

Since this was our first music video, we were okay about having a simple goal of just showing the band. But before we even filmed this last one, we had future plans of getting more and more creative with our videos as time goes on and we get better and more ambitious. We recently shot the footage for our next video with more of a storyline this time. Our goal with this next one is to get more people involved and be more quirky/creative.

Now, I know not everyone has a great computer to edit with, and a great camera to take HD footage. I’m lucky in that video and multimedia has been a hobby of mine since middle school. I had a few of the tools already, and saved up to buy the rest. Just intelligently and realistically look at the capabilities of each band member. That is how you will do it. If it makes more sense to get someone else to film and edit, do that. If you can handle doing it yourselves, then do that. In the end, whatever makes the best songs, and whatever makes the best videos – go with that!

(And as a reply to some of the comments, some people have definitely had their lives changed from YouTube alone. But as a common sense approach, use the music video and YouTube as just one more awesome tool for your band.)

Our first video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8LnBpQfDmo
“Jester” by Autumn High

Thanks!
Kenny