Wendy Day explains why video beats audio for music promotion and walks through the full pipeline: shoot behind-the-scenes footage on tour, hire student videographers for cheap, get editors to make clips for social media and websites, then pay a promoter $2,500 to $3,500 to place your videos on national platforms and gym playlists. Repurpose every frame into shorts, quotes, and stills for blogs.
Chapters
Hi guys, how are you? Content is king, so I'm gonna talk about videos today. Um, videos are important. Most people would rather watch a video of your music than listen to your music, as surprising as that is. So content is extremely important, not just the fact that you should have a video for as many songs as you can afford to make videos for, but also you want to have some background footage, um, for your website, for your social media, and even to store on a hard drive so that one day you can make a documentary about your Ascent, right? So, um, content. You want to be able to film yourself performing live at shows that you feel will have, um, effective quality, you know, something worth watching. You are on promo tour, for example, you want to have somebody with you to film your escapades. Um, the great thing about promo tours is you're constantly meeting fans and you just never really know what's going to happen. So it's always great to have somebody there filming. And more importantly than somebody that can film is somebody that can edit. You want to have, um, good quality footage that you can, um, turn into something, you know, to upload to your website or little short bursts to put on your social media, your Facebook. And you also want to Snapchat. You want to be out there, you know, doing what you got to do on your social media. You want to be meeting your fans in the places where they hang out, and you want to engage with them, and you want to show them that you have a somewhat interesting life. And you want to have a somewhat interesting life if you're going to film it. The hardest thing for me is to find find great video people that aren't super expensive. You know, if I'm going to put out 20 songs, I want to shoot 20 videos, and I can't shoot 20 videos if I'm paying $10 grand a piece because I'm not going to spend $200,000 on just videos. So what I have done in the past is I've looked at a lot of videos from up-and-coming artists in my area and I found who was shooting their videos. I do the same thing with graphics, by the way, um, find out who's shooting their videos, and then I approach that person to find out what it would take to get them on board for us as well. Um, I've also hung signs at schools that have film programs. You know, Art Institute usually has a film program. A lot of the bigger universities and colleges have a film program. And sometimes, um, students are willing to shoot footage for you, videos and footage, um, for free because they're looking to build their reel so that they can go out into the real world and make some money. And they need to have examples of what they're able to do in their portfolio in order to secure paying jobs. So you can always, um, hit up some students. Just know that if If it's somebody at the beginning of their film experience, they're not going to be as qualified as somebody that's already out there and has shot a ton of videos. But it's really important to have somebody on your team that is somewhat skilled in capturing footage. It's just, it's, it's just really helpful for promotion and marketing. Um, for the bigger songs that we put out, we usually hire a more skilled video person until our in-house videographer gets to the level where they can shoot single type videos, you know, the quality that would go on like BET Jams, you know, Fuse, um, Revolt. The quality has to be a little bit better because you're going through an approval process at those stations in order to get your song on their platform, even if you're hiring a video promoter. And which leads me to my next topic about videos is if you've got a song that's reacting, and by reacting I mean the DJs are requesting it, it's really starting to gather some traction, your spins are increasing, your streams are increasing, and you know when you've got a song that is reacting. You can, you can feel it, you can tell. Um, you definitely want to hire somebody that's got the relationships with the video platforms if you yourself don't have those relationships. And usually when you hire a video promoter, they'll charge you somewhere between $2,500 and $3,500 and it's for the life of the video, which is about a month, a month and a half, and they get it onto as many platforms as possible. The national platforms as well as local video shows around the country. Um, out in the Pacific Northwest, there just seemed to be a large amount of independent video shows. I don't know why that is. It's just, it's always been that way. Um, they're still there today. So you want to hire somebody that can get your video onto all of those platforms. You also want them to get it onto the different, um, video roles that exist. For example, the video that gets played in the Hot Topic stores around the country, um, in Foot Action— or is it Foot Locker? I always confuse them— um, one of the foot stores. Um, in the, the video roll that gets played at, um, the, um, LA Fitness gyms, those video rolls are supplied to them monthly. So your video can get included in on that roll if the video is a decent quality and the song is really starting to react. It's very hard to get on something like that if nobody knows who you are. But if you're starting to build a little bit of a buzz, that's something that your video promoter can, can also do for you. When you get to the point of hiring a video promoter, make sure you hire somebody that really does this for a living, somebody that comes well recommended. What I did when I chose my video promoter— and I've used the same guy for 10 years— I went to the program director at MTV and the program director at BET and asked for— to have some recommendations of people that were good at what they, what they do. And at the time, they gave me 3 or 4 names. I called everybody, and there's one guy that really stood out that I really liked a lot, so I gave him a chance and I hired him to do my first video. I I think it was David Banner. I can't really remember, but I hired him to do a video and he went above and beyond. Um, the second video that I did with him didn't do very well, but what I liked about him was that he went super hard. When we had trouble getting it onto the different video shows, he didn't give up. He like went even harder. And then when the results were kind of lackluster, not due to his trying, but just due to the fact that the song wasn't very well received, um, he offered to take half off of my next project, which I thought was really cool because he didn't have to do that. And, um, you know, you— it's easy to like somebody when you're— when things are going well and your project is doing great, but it's hard to like somebody when your project isn't doing well. And you can really tell somebody's character by how they handle something when something isn't going great. And that's, you know, that's the nature of this business. We are selling music, and music is subjective. Some people will like it, some people won't. And you've gotta really target the base of people that do, and sometimes it's hard to find that base. So it takes a lot of extra work. And for me, that's kind of where I can see somebody's character, is whether they give up easily and they move on to the next project and their attitude is kind of like, oh well, um, or whether they really keep working it and, and trying to knock it out of the park even though it's really a hard sell. And I have much love for the people that tend to stay around when the going gets tough. And I'm one of those people too, so I really admire that in others. So you want to get as much footage as you can. You want to share it on your social media. You want to share it on your website. Um, the great thing about footage is you can do so much with it. You can edit it down into little bite-sized snippets You can even pull audio out so that if you need to post a quote somewhere, you can do that. You can pull that out of the video. You can pull still shots so that you've got photographs that look good from your video. Video really has a lot of benefits, and the number one benefit to videos— not, not to the content per se, but to the actual videos— is that If you're trying to get placed on a blog and you want the blogs to cover your music, it is so much easier to get them to cover a video than it is to get them to cover a song. It's much easier to get a video posted than an MP3. At least that's been my experience. Um, so that's about the size of it. I think that we've touched on everything, um, about videos. If you have questions, please put it below in the comments and make sure you subscribe so that you know when these are getting posted. And I look forward to sharing more information with you. Take care.
