Early yesterday morning, Frank Ocean tweeted that music videos are not the future. This made us all cry for legitimately 45 minutes, as we collectively reacted to our beloved Frank Ocean saying such a thing. Personally, it took going through the classic 5 stages of grief for me to even be able to write this post. Im kind of at an emotional stage in my life right now, so that might have contributed to SOME of the crying, but for the most part it was because of what Frank said. This is the story of how I coped.
When I first saw the tweet I immediately called Adam and was like OMG Frank Oceans Twitter got hacked. It had to have, right? One of my music video favs of 2012 is saying that music videos arent the future? That cant be true, I love music videos and Frank Ocean both, and usually for the same reason!
I then tried to further justify it by suggesting that we cant speculate on what Frank Ocean means by the future, and that it's just a tweet and there isn't any context. Even so, Adam said, people are going to interpret it as meaning that music videos are a dying art form, and that they will no longer be useful in promoting music or musicians.
But then, wait a second Frank. What about all that stuff that Forbes said about branding, and YouTube said about popularity, and Vevo said about profit? "And that's something that's changed within the past six years," Adam added. "Another thing that's changed is now, pretty much everyone carries around a screen with them. There is less and less of an opportunity for someone to engage with music without some visuals to go along with it."
So, maybe Frank is wrong. Maybe being a really talented an charismatic performer doesnt automatically make you the end all, be all judge on music videos. Wow, and just like that, I'm no longer worried about whether or not music videos are the future. Now, when I think of the financial state of music videos, all I think of is this!
