Why do artists want to sound great but look bad?

I must talk to at least 10 artists every week with the same situation: they spent well over 10 to 20 grand mastering the audio for their album but now can’t even come up with one to two grand to make a video. The majority of musicians I meet are not aware of how relevant promoting themselves visually is; it’s not that your music should sound bad, but how are you going to get through the noise if you don’t stand out?

Having a professional looking video is more important today than it was ten years ago, because of video publishing sites such as Youtube, Imeem, Myspace and now the emerging Vimeo.com that supports High Definition. Several years ago, if the band or label did not have connections with Mtv or Vh1(back when they still played videos during hours of the day when people were awake), the video would get little to no exposure. The same reality exists for writers before blogs were available, how do you get your material to the masses?

Since the internet has changed the playing field so drastically in the last few years, local bands are now competing with the big names; and they are doing it mostly with video quality that seems as if they shot on their father’s 8mm camera and had no lights available. The image you portray is part of your brand, the same way you do not want to hand out a flyer that looks amature, a poorly shot video decreases the perceived value of your performance.

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