Shots Ring Out decries the rise of YouTube as a music video medium:
The subtle emotion that an artist exudes, the very thing that defines their personality and thus defines their charm and money-making ability, may be lost. The polish and shine you paid all that money for gets thrown right out the window when I see it in a compressed 320 x 240 box.
This distribution method is making your artists look bad.
They are completely right, of course. YouTube videos look like shit. But they’re also completely wrong about YouTube’s effectiveness. Bitching about video quality is completely missing the point. The reason why YouTube has become the number one medium for music videos on the internet is because virulence trumps quality every time, and flash-based video like YouTube is far easier to transmit and spread via the internet than any other video format currently in use.
Think about it. In order to watch a high-quality 30MB Xvid-encoded AVI file, I have to first download the file (we’re still not quite at the stage where anyone can reliably stream a 30MB three-minute movie reliably). Then I have to open it using a media player—probably Windows Media Player or Quicktime (does it open AVIs?) or VLC or MPlayer. As this sort of thing is usually OS-specific (who would run WMP on OS X, anyways?) let’s assume you can just double-click on the file and the correct player will open it. Do you have the Xvid codec? It doesn’t come standard with any of the major media players, certainly not the ones that come preinstalled with the OS. So unless you’re smart enough to know where to grab Xvid (and “smart enough” usually means downloading one of those bloated, adware-filled codec packs) or a proper media player (how many people know what VLC is, or that it can play just about anything?), you’re going to have yet more trouble. And even assuming you’ve got all the proper software, you still have to download every video you want to watch.
In order to watch a YouTube video, you click on the play button and you’re watching it. Sure, it looks like crap. But look at all the trouble I didn’t have to go through in order to do it: I didn’t have to download anything because nearly everyone who’s going to watch a YouTube video already has Flash installed, and installing Flash is a fairly simple procedure these days. It’s a streaming video, so the wait before I get to watch the video is much shorter. But the real trump card is not how easy it is to watch, but how easy it is to show to other people.
If you want to show people that awesome music video you found somewhere, you have two choices: link to the video or try to embed it in your blog. But embedding a Quicktime movie or an AVI is a pain in the ass. Have you ever examined the HTML code necessary to embed a movie, whether it be Quicktime or YouTube? It’s a pain in the ass having to write all that code. YouTube provides this code for you in a neat little package—copy the right textbox and paste into your blog post. With downloaded videos, you have to write this code yourself, which is non-trivial. Furthermore, you have to find a place to host it, or else hotlink the video from the original server. No one likes a hotlinker. Obviously, with a YouTube video, the content is stored on YouTube servers, and so you don’t have to worry about where to store the video yourself.
Yes, I would love it if YouTube’s video quality improved. But I’ve watched entire documentaries and TV shows on YouTube and Google Video, and I enjoyed them immensely despite the relatively poor video quality. Complaining about how poor video quality is ruining music videos is like complaining about how MP3s ruin music because they cut off high frequencies and introduce compression artifacts. That’s great, but I don’t like carting around 400 CDs whenever I go out, I don’t want to have to reach for my CD collection whenever I want to listen to a different album, and I sure as hell don’t want to mess around with a record player just to eliminate the cold, digital sound of CDs. I want to listen to music.
I will continue to download high quality music videos whenever they’re provided, but I won’t lose any sleep about the dominance of YouTube. Not for video quality reasons, anyways.
P.S. About the headline of this post: Shots Ring Out starts its post with commentary on an artist who produced his latest music video with a cellphone, and how you couldn’t tell because the poor YouTube compression makes everything look like it was produced on a cellphone. Where they see bad practice, I see good; shooting video on a cellphone because you don’t need anything more powerful is called good budgeting and making use of what you’ve got. Special effects and HD cameras aren’t everything, as the entire independent film industry can attest.
I assure you I have not missed the point about YouTube. I know why YouTube is successful (my boy 30Frames sums it up nicely). YOUR point seems to be that YouTube can piss and shit on music videos as much as it wants because that improved distribution is worth it.
My point is that, no, there is a line. Everything would be peachy if YouTube were just *one* method of seeing those videos. Instead, it seems to be the *only* way anybody can see a music video these days. Therein lies the problem. Music videos suddenly become the art form of compression artifacts, indecipherable facial expressions, and out-of-synch sound. That is, music videos start ceasing to be an art form. Combine this with the fact that music videos were *dying* from cut budgets already, and you have trouble for the long-term viability of the craft.
Your post has a few straw-men. MP3 compression is on a completely different planet from YouTube compression when you consider the quality relative to the limits of human perception. Mp3 isn’t perfect, but it’s in the 90th percentile in terms of people being able to notice. YouTube is failing miserably, especially as HD content becomes more prevalent. And the whole DivX, Xvid, codec thing is also a farce. Quicktime files (preferably with h.264 compression) are the only high-quality, cross-platform, “just works” option (largely due to iTunes/iPod market penetration) and I think using anything else is just silly if you want normal people to be able to view your file. Maybe you could consider WMV 9, but outside of that you’re just asking to be ignored (and even then you’re ignoring all Mac and Linux users). Yes, even a Quicktime file pales in convenience comparison to YouTube, but it’s nowhere near the bleak AVI picture you paint.
Eventually YouTube will stop sucking and all will be well, but you have to assume that music videos will still exist in any recognizable form by then. It just may be that YouTube effectively scares away all the artists and eliminates all the money before this happens. Ask any therapist: “I know I’m getting hurt now, but I’ll stick with it because things will eventually get better” is a very common and very dangerous pattern of thinking.
And a video made with a cellphone is clever the first time somebody does it, sad the second time somebody does it, and just depressing from number three on. Let’s hope we never get to that point.
There is no definite answer. Places that make higher quality downloads as easy to obtain as possible help, but they are no YouTube replacement. Finding high quality files is way harder than it should be. If the labels would just throw the directors and music video nerds a few bones every now and then (”bones” being higher quality downloads in addition to the YouTube versions) it might be just enough to get everyone to stick around for YouTube 2.0. I think the idealistic YouTube that doesn’t quite exist WILL be worth it as there are many, many positives to that system, but right now it’s doing as much damage as construction.
Comment by James — December 11, 2006 @ 10:27 pm
I think one crucial difference between our viewpoints is that you believe YouTube is the be all and end all of music videos. I know the joke is that MTV, MuchMusic and their ilk don’t play music videos any more, but of course that’s a huge exaggeration; you can still see plenty of music videos on television. YouTube is just one way of seeing videos. The fact that it happens to be a fairly popular one these days means YouTube perhaps holds an amount of power over the medium that seems “dangerous,” but it’s not as though people were forced to watch low-quality videos. YouTube isn’t powerful because people were forced to watch; YouTube became powerful because people like the model and are willing to accept the trade-offs.
YouTube hasn’t exactly wiped out the music video ecosystem, mainly because there wasn’t one to begin with. It’s not as though there were plenty of places to download music videos before YouTube came along anyways, so the idea that we used to be able to download high-quality versions of all your favourite videos is mostly false. That is, unless you count the ripped versions of music videos from the likes of MTV. Other than that, distribution of high-quality QT and AVI videos was scattershot at best.
I lump Quicktime in with AVIs and the like because there are issues with Quicktime codecs as well. MP4 files can be just as troublesome, if my experience has been any indication. MOV files “just work” if you’re using iTunes/Quicktime or VLC/MPlayer, but not everyone has either—mostly Windows platforms. But I do agree with you that Quicktime is, on the whole, easier to deal with.
Finally, the other crucial difference between our viewpoints. Based on your discussion of budgets and special effects, I’m guessing your perspective (and 30frames as well) is from a very different area of the music industry than mine. Most of the bands I listen to, in an earlier age, wouldn’t bother with music videos at all because there’d be no chance in hell of them ever being played by the gatekeepers. The same television-based system that allows Gwen Stefani to shoot extravagant videos costing tens of thousands (hundred of thousands?) of dollars also prevents most smaller, independent bands from ever getting any substantial airplay. If a band is lucky, they get maybe a couple of plays on MTV2 when the video is new.
Nearly all of my favourite videos on YouTube are videos I would never have seen on television—videos like the full nine-minute version of Saint Etienne’s “How We Used To Live,” a video that’s been at several music video festivals but is “too long.” Or Sleater-Kinney’s “Get Up,” shot by Miranda July, who recently directed Me and You and Everyone We Know. If the internet hadn’t come along and the general trend towards investing only in surefire winners continued, these sorts of videos would cease to exist altogether.
I agree that record labels should absolutely be posting higher quality versions of their videos on their own sites; that’s just common sense (why throw away an asset that could possibly bring in money?). But I never expect the major labels to exhibit anything resembling common sense. And besides, from what I’ve seen YouTube has vastly increased the audience for music videos despite the low quality. How can this ever be a bad thing, even taking into account your concerns? At worst, it means no one shoots glitzy, glamorous videos because it turns out the audience doesn’t really care. But I don’t think that will happen, so long as people continue to buy Director’s Label DVD sets full of music videos they could just watch on TV—or on YouTube, for that matter.
Comment by Wesley — December 11, 2006 @ 11:02 pm
Actually, I’ll take back the “you must be thinking of giant pop stars with huge budgets” comment because I see one of your most recent posts was on the Blow, so obviously you’re at least aware of the low end of things.
Interestingly, you should (if you don’t already) also know of the other Blow project that never quite got off the ground, but the evidence of which is all over YouTube: a collaborative video piece for “Pile of Gold,” consisting entirely of fan submitted videos posted via YouTube. The idea was to put the videos together and play them behind Khaela while she was on tour, but the whole thing fell apart because she couldn’t find a way to download the videos off YouTube. Which is, of course, both a refutation of YouTube (I can’t get content off it!) and a triumph (look at all these fans who managed to make a music video and get people to watch them!)
One last thing: I think YouTube 2.0 will come faster than you think. The major limiting factor is bandwidth, and that’s increasingly only a problem in North America, as more densely-populated areas like Japan, Korea and western Europe gain access to 10Mbps+ connections. I sincerely find it hard to believe the music video industry will be dead before someone comes up with a high-bandwidth version of YouTube. In fact, arguably early versions are here now.
Comment by Wesley — December 11, 2006 @ 11:38 pm