Lyric Videos to the Rescue: Low Cost, Big Results


"Love Shouldn't Hurt" Lyric Video

If you don't have big money to make a big budget video (like me and most other indie artists), consider lyric videos to bring your song to life!

There are essentially a couple low-cost ways to create a lyric video- DIY or hire someone at a reasonable indie musician rate.

DIY

If you're a tech person with a good eye, consider getting a program like iMovie to make your own lyric videos. Essentially you can just drop in the song as an Mp3, then make titles over photos or plain backgrounds. Here's a pretty neat sample of a DIY video that my friend Marcum made for a song we wrote. He used a PC based tool called Cyberlink, pulled movie clips from YouTube, sized them all the same and made a background movie theatre in PhotoShop with a green screen (like grass green). Then he used 'Chromakey' in Cyberlink to get the movie to play on the faux screen. Pretty cool huh? There are some great tutorials on YouTube about how to make these types of videos like this one.

You can also do a lyric video along with footage of you singing, like this one I did in 2016. Like Marcum, I used Cyberlink, and I shot the video on a regular camera as well as a Go-Pro (you can rent Go-Pros if you don't want to buy them).
 

Hire a Reasonably Priced Pro

I was recently in the market for a lyric video resource because I’m launching a new single called “Love Shouldn’t Hurt” in Europe and I needed something to use to promote it. It took me some time to find some affordable and professional lyric video makers. Prices vary depending on what you want specifically, but the average for a low-cost lyric video you can expect to pay is anywhere from $200-$400.

When you reach out to these pros, you may want to have ideas about concepts, but it’s not necessary because they will have some great ideas as well. I knew for example that for Love Shouldn’t Hurt” that I didn’t want to have a real edgy looking video because it’s a story song about someone getting out of an abusive relationship. The song influenced the choices we made for the video- for example we used a handwritten font instead of a more block one.

Below are a few resources and a sample from each video maker I found, and they all have videos priced in the range listed above:


Justin Dahl- Rain City Productions

Sample Video
Contact Page

Anthony McGrace- Great Heights Design Studio

Sample Video
Contact Page

When you finish with your video, post it on your YouTube page, then on your website. It's important to put the video on your website, because you want to drive people to your site, not YouTube where they can get distracted by cats.

Once posted, share, share, share! Send emails to your fans and friends…and create social media posts. Remember to share it multiple times on Facebook and twitter especially in different ways- tag the video maker, pick out a line you like the best to highlight, shout out to your co-writers or musicians that played on the record, etc.

I can't wait to see your new lyric videos- so tag me with your new lyric videos on twitter at @shansmusic and I'll be sure to retweet and share!