The Role of Music Videos in Promoting Indie Artists
We take a look at the short and long term impact music videos can have on music promotion.

A music video is a visual addition to a song that artists usually create in form of a music video. Usually, we get music videos of singles that come before an album to serve as a promotion to the album.

However, in some cases, some artists create a movie-like music video for a song of theirs or their whole album. For example, we can take Eminem. Eminem wrote a song called “Stan” for his album “The Marshall Mathers LP” where he made a music video of the song in a form of a short movie of 8 minutes. This music video served as a visual interpretation of the song adding on a couple things here and there to give more quality to the song overall.

Taking this example into account, we can say the same thing for indie artists. Just like the music video of “Stan” helped Eminem express his emotions, and in turn promoted his song making it one of his biggest hits, music videos can help with promoting indie artists a lot, even to be considered as a vital part of an artist’s career.

Which is why, I have compiled some of the reasons that a music video is important for an indie artist to increase their reach.

And if you feel like checking out “Stan” to get an example of how a music video can add value to a song, here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOMhN-hfMtY

Additional content

One of the most obvious reasons a music video is important in general is that it adds on to the song, even if it is simple. We can see with a lot of music videos that nothing really is added other than people dancing but with some cases we can see that some artists like to draw out a story with their music videos.

For example we can take former youtuber and now artist Joji, in 2020 he made several music videos all linked to each other which made all the songs much more interesting, with a lot of people trying to analyze or build a timeline around his music videos. We can see a direct relation with his 2 music videos “Gimme love” and “Run”

Another artist we can take as an example for additional content is the indie artist “DAX”. The majority of his music videos have additional content, like his music video “JOKER” where he added on to the audio by acting insane, leaving the viewer more impacted by the combination of audio + video than just the audio.

Another example of an artist making a unique type of music video is Quadeca. With his 2022 album “I Didn’t Mean to Haunt You”, Quadeca made an hour-long movie-like music video for the whole album tying it all together adding on to the horror and mystery of it.

Another way you can include additional content in your music videos as an artist is your clothes. A lot of artists like Elton John, Young Thug, Kid Cudi etc. wear a lot of weird and unusual clothes to their concert, while Billie Eilish wears baggy clothes supporting a cause that also serves as promotion causing a trend in clothes. This simple move of changing styles of clothing in a music video and promoting it around social media created a whole trend that shook up the whole fashion industry.

Who knows? Maybe you can be the new artist to create a fashion trend, or a musical trend, or a trend in music video direction that nobody thought of before, you never know for yourself until you try.

Link to “Gimme Love”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPan651rVMs

Link to “Run”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K09_5IsgGe8

Link to “JOKER” (WARNING: Some sensitive topics are brought up in the audio and the video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-KJV5r_cho

Link to the album “I Didn’t Mean to Haunt You”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tbOspjJ5f0&t=16s

Additional Views

We can see with majority of music videos if not all, they get more views and attention than the audio version. The reason is obvious enough, viewers love to view. And as an indie artist, you can use music videos to help with the views and grow your audience more. To create a music video, you don’t need much, there are many songs which have animated music videos done for them, or that are only a recording of the artist performing live or in his room, but it still gets much more views in general.

As an example of how a simple music video can serve as a boost to the audience of an artist, we can take Tai Verdes. To show appreciation to Australia, Tai Verdes, an indie pop artist, shot a music video for his song “How Deep” in Australia that consists of him performing in Australia and just his trip in Australia in general. This type of music video not only is simple and effortless for Tai Verdes, but it will gain him a lot of views worldwide and will grow his Australian audience as they got a music video dedicated to them, making the already existing Australian fans feeling more attached to Tai Verdes as an artist.

Assistance in Promotion

There is a reason while we scroll at Instagram we see a lot of advertisements for music videos, or even on YouTube ads, it is more attractive to promote a music video.
As a viewer, looking at an image while scrolling through Instagram or YouTube shorts or twitter or other forms of social media to listen to a song can be a hassle, or if it is an advertisement, it would seem just boring as the eye catches nothing that feeds its attention.

However, if that advertisement, reel, short etc. is a video where we can see the artist having fun or showing any kind of emotion, we will feel an attraction to the video whilst our ear will start listening carefully to the song. For example, we can take my personal experience. I was scrolling through Instagram where I was finding a lot of songs of artists that I just skipped because they were all too uninteresting for me, a song with an image over it just wasn’t enough to catch my attention.

However, one caught the attention of my eye, which is a music video of an underground rapper by the name of Hb Al. His music video was extremely similar to many other rap songs, but because it was a video it stood out from the other songs that just put an image over the music that was being played. For that reason, I went and checked out his song “Die Young” that was being promoted and his other songs.

If you want to check out the song “Die Young”, here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFZ_rlwjUFI

Conclusion

To conclude this article, we can safely say that music videos in general are a huge addition to an artist’s repertoire and could be the reason of some artist’s success, like Lil Pump with his one hit “Gucci Gang”.

A music video adds value to the song, adds content, and helps with gaining attention and with promotion. And for indie artists, I advise you to follow the formula that other artists have set, unless you want to make a unique type of music video that tells a story (like Quadeca with his album “I Didn’t Mean to Haunt You”). This formula is 3 music videos of singles derived from an album at max, or a music video for every single you put out in hopes that one of them skyrockets your career, which isn’t as rare as you think.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_(song)

https://www.rostr.cc/profile/workofart/management/roster

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/quadeca/i-didnt-mean-to-haunt-you/