HMV closed in the UK this week, for better or worse. It truly awful that so many (lets face it, young) people lose jobs, and 'the highstreet' is down another big name that was selling a product for twice the price of its internet based tax avoiding counterparts. But it doesn't mean people stopped buying music... in the US at least, music sales are actually up.
I visit my local record store pretty regularly, which from what I hear is still sadly a dying breed despite vinyl sales being way up recently. Of course most of my purchases are online, whether its physical or digital; but recently it seems to be directly from small labels or the bands themselves (often this is the same entity). Things are actually returning to a more interesting, exciting way of discovering and experiencing music.
I get a fair amount of requests from bands to make music videos, which is always a difficult 'no' to send back. Putting money aside, I rarely have time to even consider a 3-4 minute fully animated project that would be produced exclusively late at night. For something so ephemeral as a youtube upload that makes its way around blogs for a week then inevitably turns into a comment war about something unrelated. Even if it gets made then would it really be the deciding factor in someone buying your record? The most interesting music videos I saw last year were essentially short films driven by the creators, the music was almost an afterthought, I didn't even care who the band was.
The upside is there's more interesting ways to create art that sits alongside and ties in to music, drives it forward, makes it more desirable. I'd much rather be involved in something more exciting... that doesn't involve 4000 frames!
I'm currently working on no less than 3 projects with people who are in the 'music industry' in one way or another, and not one of them is a music video. The one that's remotely close only has music in it for 14 seconds!
So by all means get in touch to work together, nothing makes me happier than to juxtapose my commercial work with adventurous projects involving punk and hardcore bands, but please just think outside the music video format!