Videos - massive energy suck

Community Questions
#1

I’m releasing music now because i finally feel like i have a good process overall for recording and mixing a quality product. my pace has improved dramatically and I’m planning on putting out a song every 3 weeks through December. The 3rd one comes out on Sep 24.

So now I want people to HEAR this music, and I’ve been soaking in the 21 day plan for the past weeks, and have gotten a ton of good info here and things to think about. I’m not a kid, and EVERYONE that’s in my age-bracket listens to music via YouTube. Many folks my age aren’t on Spotify at all yet. it just is what it is.

but YouTube means VIDEOS. and man, I’ve been feeling nothing but stress trying to make these happen. I mean no one can be good at everything, and I just don’t have a network yet that includes this flavor of creative folks. I’m planning to just “settle” for doing a real video every other release, just plopping out some kind of static album cover art as the video backdrop for the other songs.

the other wrinkle? My music is instrumental, so the fail-safe “lyric video” really isn’t an option. So I’ve been spending a tremendous amount of energy trying to solve this angle of my music presentation.

so what are you guys doing? Would love to hear opinions.
Kyle Barton

#2

Man, do I hear you on that mate. Have you checked out sites like pixabay.com? You can get loads of free and royalty-free video clips from there that can be really useful for background footage. What kind of style of instrumental music is it?

I started out releasing stuff and learning from Damo a year and a half ago, and I discovered the same thing. I had so little patience for video editing (I got a little burnt out with video editing in my job, so I had little patience for it.

Out of all the releases over the last 14 months, I’ve done exactly one proper music video. I was proud of it and it ‘did OK’ - not many views, but it got over 50% retention rate, which someone told me was decent. But when you add it all up from the shoot to the editing etc, it was MANY of hours of work for only 50 or 60 views, which doesn’t seem like a good return on investment. Thankfully it didn’t cost much to make!

I’m glad that I’ve made at least one official music video, and I might make one in the future, but these days I’m letting myself be content with making lyric videos. There’s only so much one person can do.

1 Like
#3

thanks for the detailed response. i’ll check out Pixabay. i used RotorVideo (recommended by CDBaby) for my first one, and i think it serves its purpose well.

but yes, the creativity to put a story to music in a video is way more than i’ve bargained for so far. I have a (for me) VERY elaborate video scheduled to come out for my release called “On the Rocks”. It comes out Oct 15, and has been a lot of work. Definitely not sustainable for each release, but if it comes together it’s going to be the definitive imagery from this first project. I’ll post it here.

So i feel like i will have to “settle” for the single-shot videos for some of these, and a mix of live stuff.