FluidRiver's Blog

(Cet article en français ici).

Music video is this strange, little known audiovisual object. Often despised and sometimes praised, it remains one of the most powerful tools to promote and discover an artist. Since digital production and broadcast technologies are becoming more and more affordable, but at the same time music labels see their revenues falling, we asked ourselves a very simple question: does a music video's online popularity depend on its budget ?

The reasons for this study

The current study aims at analyzing the link that exists between a music video's production budget and its online popularity (aka: on the Internet). It also attempts to provide cues on the other factors that explain a music video's online sucess. To our knowledge, this is the first time such a study has been made.

We hope it will provide insightful information to labels -whether majors or indies, and artists -whether signed or unsigned, regarding a successful digital marketing strategy, in which music videos play a major role. The main conclusion of this study is that music video Internet popularity is a combination of (1) the instrinc quality of the music video, (2) the strength of artist-fan connection and (3) the strategy set out by the music label.

The limits of this study

1. This study is only concerned with the popularity of music videos, measured on 2 major video sharing platforms (YouTube and Dailymotion). We have not taken in account other platforms such as Vimeo, Metacafe, or others. YouTube is indeed the world's #1 video sharing site and DailyMotion is France's #1 video sharing site. Combining their respective traffics accounts for a very large part of French Internet video-watching traffic.
   
2. We also discarded the measure of music video exposure on TV, whether on aerial, cable or satellite networks, simply because our study is restricted to Internet usage.
3. The 114 music videos under scrutiny are all either in French language, or by French-speaking artists residing in Europe (those criterias are not ours but those imposed by the FCM - see below).

The key document : 114 music videos submitted to FCM

Our study is based on a document we got hold of back in 2008. At that time, the document was publically and freely available on the Internet (it is no longer the case).

This document presents the decisions of the FCM commission regarding financial support requests for 114 music videos produced in 2007 (the Fonds de Création Musicale is France's state-subsidied fund providing financial support to music video production industry. A commission -composed of author and producer collective societies, meets on a monthly basis, reviews financial support requests emitted by labels and AV production societies, and decides or not to grant financial help to a given music video project - more information can be found here ici).

For each of the 114 music videos submitted to the FCM commission, the document states "the song's title, the music video's production budget, the recording artist and music label name, the amount of co-production, the CNC re-investment part (that's a tricky notion but basically a French audiovisual company that receives financial support from the Centre National du Cinéma - National Center for film-making, has an option to re-invest part of that money on a new project), the TV channels that aired or are about to air the music video, the commission decision, as well as the amount of the financial support provided".

As a side-observation, we note that indie labels are rather well represented given their actual share of the CD sales market (20%), with 43 support requests (amounting to 37%), the remaining 71 requests being issued by majors. For obvious reasons of confidentiality and because our intent is to provide statistical trends, this study was fully anonymized.

The principles of the study

For each music video, we went to YouTube and Dailymotion in order to measure: (1) the number of page views and (2) the video's online presence duration. We then computed the music video popularity (sum of page views) and the instantaneous popularity (average number of page views per month).

We then plotted these data on two separate graphs : (budget, popularity) and (budget,instantaneous popularity)

The results

Fact 1 : Most of a music video's page views are achieved quickly after it's been put online

The striking observation when looking at the two charts, is that the pont clouds are extremely similar. The reason ? Virality : a music video enjoys a "peak" of page views a few days or a few weeks after it was released online. This peak then quickly falls down. The same phenomenon is found in the movie industry, with films enjoying most of their audience quickly after their public release). Whether looking at popularity or instantaneous popularity, the same statistical trend is observed.

Fact 2 : The online popularity of a music video does not depend on its budget

On each graph, we overlaid a blue curve that represents the average page views vs. budget. Surprise surprise : this curve is almost horizontal, which proves that the "budget" factor has little incidence on popularity. If we were to discard the most seen or most expensive music videos (referred to as "outliers" in statistics), we would litterally obtain a flat, horizontal curve. A 40k Euro music video won't necessarily been seen twice as much as a 20k Euro one !

Fact 3 : The most popular music videos are not the most expensive ones

That's obvious on the first chart : a dozen music videos exceed a million views, with production budgets that are in -if not less than, the average range.

Leaving the French music video scene for a while, one of the music videos with the highest impact -yet almost zero-budget, is "Daft Hands" and its staggering 39 millions views on YouTube:

A recent exemple is "70 Million" by "Hold Your Horses", revisiting famous paintings :

Or Dailymotion's most viewed music video in 2009: the eye-catching and highly sexual "Baby Baby Baby" from French band "Make The Girl Dance" (1 million views in 3 days, 8 millions views as of today). Let's just look at... the idea itself : it's a single sequence shot, and they dared doing it.

Last example : a beautiful, low-budget music video, which grants its author and the band a nice 12 millions views in YouTube in a year.

Fact 4 : It is possible to produce expensive, yet little-seen music videos

On the right-hand side of the graphs, it is astonishing to see that the most expensive music videos receive a marginal visibility. Few people watched those music videos on the Internet (which does not mean that they did not enjoy nice exposure on TV). One of the reasons we can think of is that the marketing efforts of the record labels got focused on traditional media for those specific videos. But, as we explain it in the conclusions of this study, it is a shame not to leverage the visibility "reservoir" of the Internet, for the artist itself, for the record label and for the music video director and production company.

Conclusion(s)

Which conclusions can be drawn from this study ? Since the budget factor seems to have little influence in the online success of a video, what is then a key factor ? In fact, there is not a single but several factors:

1. The strength of the music video itself : a music video is one idea. This idea generally comes from the director. Through personal sensitivity, using a know-how of crafting images, helped with a continuing dialog with the artist, he/she will bring alive to the screen an emotion perceived in a track. A music video must be enticing enough to get the user watching it until the end, watching it over and sharing it. Some music videos are litterally little gems of audiovisual expression and sometimes, magic happens : these ones will litterally propell an artist way beyond its native fanbanse, because the director will have caught that « something universal » in the track. In this situation, the artist acquires new fans through images. We dub this phenomenon overshoot (drawgin on the analogy with physical phenomenons). If buzz is good, overshoot is better ! Because overshoot is a unique opportunity to grow a fanbase deeply and spontaneously.
2. The coherence of the artist’s universe : an artist’s universe stretches well beyond music. If the underlying thought is sincere, this universe (records, concerts, collaborations, interviews, cover art, music videos, etc.) will be coherent and the public will feel it. Watch a live performance by an artist that you liked in a music video, and millions of images will re-surface, providing a unique experience to the fan.
3. The strength of the artist-fan relationship: an artist’s strength is its fanbase, this will never be repeated enough, especially during this crisis era that the music industry plunged into a few years ago. The stronger the relationship, the more the artist can rely on its fans to take care of its viral promotion by sharing music videos, tracks, interviews, etc. Because we only share what has value to us, feeling close to an artist has a lot of value to a fan and therefore to an artist. The possiblity to share implies a potential for virality.
4. Fanbase demographics : sociologically speaking, the younger (or the more teenage) the fanbase of an artist, the more this audience is familiar with network digital life (social networks, chat, online video games, Internet-capable gaming consoles, etc.) and the more virality is likely to develop. An artist whose fans are, regardless of the reasons, less in phase with digital and Internet life, has obviously less chances to generate an Internet buzz. These demographics data are therefore a pre-requisite before setting up any « image » strategy around an artist. Who are the fans ?
5. Artist’s notoriety : the larger the notoriety, the larger the potential for media hype. With traditional media, this potential is leveraged by storming radios, télévision and press at once. But Internet is a game-changer, and the same strategies do not necessarily work as can be seen with large-budget music videos (which are generally reserved for cash-cow artists) which achieve little popularity. Corollary : a lesser-known artist can equally take the Internet by storm provided the right tools are used.
6. The label’s digital strategy : last but not least, choosing the right digital marketing strategy –music video being a part of it, is largely responsible for the online success of a music video. How come a substantial investment on a music video projet does not translate into a significant number of page views ? The main reason is that by choosing to focus marketing efforts and resources on a classical (pre-Internet, solely targeted at traditional media) strategy, the online exposure potential will not be leveraged. Thinking about the life of a music video after it was shot is therefore as important as the music video itself. Internet is a powerful, plastic media, whose usage are constantly changing. One thing is sure : fans are more and more sitting in front of computer or mobile screens, and less and less in front of TV sets. Understanding this is the first step into understanding fans !

Internet recèle de clips atypiques, originaux, souvent fait avec des budgets serrés voire sans budget du tout. Et pourtant, la qualité n'est pas proportionnelle au budget. La preuve en image:

• Le clip lauréat d'un concours pour Gossip, tout en marionnettes (collectif vidéo: The Beautiful Fools)

• Un clip de Cinematic Orchestra (jazz/electro) assemblé à partir d'images d'un film russe de 1929 de Dziga Vertov, intitulé "Man With A Movie Camera".

• Clip pour "" de Flairs, par Jonas & Francois (D.A.N.C.E de Justice), tourné dans un appartement rue Saint-Denis, repeint image par image à la main, reflashé et remonté. Magnifique!

• Clip de Camille Henrot pour 'Principles of Geometry', avec Sébastien Tellier en back-vocals, diffusé à l'origine au Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris. Plan séquence à moto dans les Alpes (suisses ?).