Indie Music Video

What Makes a Great Indie Music Video?

In our humble opinion, indie music video is at it’s best when it’s a chance taking, friend making, low budget thing. Low budget isn’t required for a great indie music video, it’s just prevalent, and frequently fated to be due to indies’ need to express with freedom in both form and subject matter. With this indie spirit and these constraints there could be said to be an independent arts ethos, and a less clear but no less vivid indie music video aesthetic.

Popular Indie Video Making Tactics

Illustration and stop motion animation; found footage and home video; single, striking effects repeated; second hand and re-purposed objects and costumes used with irony and/or sincerity; simple camera work that finds beautiful angles and light by looking closely… all of these are recurring features of compelling indie music video.

All of these tactics can evoke a nostalgia, a respect for simple, memorable things, a sense of memory in general, and of individual human hands and thoughts and mind sparks and heart beats… when successful the resulting videos are inherently relatable, lovable even.

Fortunately, all of the above are artistic strategies that can be reused with endless variety, usually cheaply, in the hands of hopefully endless artists, to infinitely personal and compelling results so long as the source footage is somewhat beautiful and the editor’s aim is true.

The Indie Artist Multi-Tasker

Since part of what is implied by indie is the independent-minded artist who crosses boundaries willfully, if not willy-nilly, it could also be a trope of indie music videos to have musicians who are also illustrators, animators, directors, etc, with results that can evoke the whole inner world of the weird and the wonderful ones who would go it alone.

Video Expressions of Indie Community

Funnily enough, the flip side is also true of indie music videos: the budget constraints amoung other factors can force a reliance on friends and fellow indie makers to make the resulting music video an icon for the entire artistic, bizarre, diverse, perverse and ultimately beautiful experience of being in an art-making community.

Where Can You Find Indie Music Videos?

Well, first off, lots of indie music videos have been featured on Indyish Video and in our Indie Music Video series on the blog.

Over 350 indie music videos have been gathered in a playlist for your pleasure, accessible here:

Indie band websites tend to be the best place to get access to their indie music video content – at least content that the band currently likes. Some truly great band websites keep extensive music video archives and even enable and encourage fan video sharing, taking the indie desire for a direct relationship with fans to the logical next step of closing the gap between them. Bands like the Cocteau Twins channel(ed) a steady creative output unwelcome on mainstream media directly to the Internet in a freewheelin “share this stuff, man, I made it for you” way that has also come to define part of what it is to be indie.

Video sharing websites – especially Vimeo which prioritizes positive and creative user interaction – are gathering places for new indie music video directors. Self-organized groups like Vimeo’s Indie Music Video Director’s group have some beautiful and entertaining content and, potentially more importantly, offer easy entry points for artists looking to develop a little more linkage.

Traditional media outlets have brought huge amounts of content online in that sometimes impressive and well-organized, sometimes surprisingly misguided, way that money can have of making things happen. MTV has an Indie section that is extensive and easy to navigate.

Irish web start up MUZU.tv rocks harder though. They signed a licensing deal with Merlin, the collective bargaining agency for a huge group of indie rights holders, and now they can legally play thousands of popular indie music videos, allow their users to collect and share them, AND artists get paid 50% of the ad revenue on their content. The rest will follow and innovate. The future is here people.

More sites with Indie Music Video Collections:

Sputnik7: http://sputnik7.com/category/31-indie-rock.html
Clickmusic: http://www.clickmusic.com/videos
Yahoo Music: http://new.music.yahoo.com/videos/7318863
Vopod: http://vodpod.com/tag/indie
Veoh: http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/music_indie_music

Indie Music Videos of the Future

Enabled by the Internet the realm of fan video has exploded, and some indie bands have encouraged fan videos to especially notable results, like The Black Lips, for example amoung others.

Taking the idea of the fan video to the crowd-sourcing next level, official contests that are organized and promoted by bands, labels, or blogs try to get a lot of videos made all at once at a greatly reduced cost while creating a community building opportunity for everyone involved. Fan video contests give the band a lot of choice (more or less depending on who is producing the contest) and they give the video artists a chance to innovate and experiment with less pressure then if they were already on contract, knowing that no matter what, their work will go online with the other submissions and be seen.

Fellow Montrealers and wise friends at Said the Gramophone produced a truly Wonderful Video Contest in 2008. Indyish produced our own version of the indie music video making contest twice in 2006. The band Thunderheist produced a similar contest, and one of the submissions became their official video and one of the hottest videos of 2008. All the cool kids are doing it, in other words.

Some of the most interesting resources for independent music videos online don’t even specialize in broadcasting official videos.

Instead it’s like the web takes the musicians hostage to make new videos. How this usually goes down it seems, based on the bewildered, tired, euphoric looks on the bandmates faces, is that the Internets hijack the artists to make new art babies together on streets or inside amazing architectural surprises. Much to the delight of onlookers.

Cinematographer Vincent Moon and his site Blogotheque are the trail blazers in this area with their Take Away Shows. Inspired by the results, indie music and video lovers in Vienna started They Shoot Music. In Toronto there is a brand new version called Secret Sessions Tara that is maybe less visually stunning then the first two, but is produced with the Audio Recording Academy of Toronto and offers a free and legal mp3 download of the session, which is a sweet twist. More are cropping up around the world.

Music magazines online are branching out to bring more waves of music video to you.

XLR8R TV is pretty friendly and sexy and great, VBS TV combines music video with alternative news to powerful effect, and Pitchfork TV combines official music videos releases with live shows, studio sessions, and interviews and adds the mega Internet status created by their long winded good taste to make them the most powerful voice in indie music video land.

But for how long? And who will rock indie music video land hardest and next? Likely candidates are probably currently out there somewhere in blog land, rocking an internet following that’s quiet so far, but large, and largering… We’ll see I guess!

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