lushlife - magnolia
Lady Gaga - The cure
rustie - ATTAK
Bob Dylan - Subterranean Homesick Blues
U2 - You’re the Best Thing About Me
ED SHEERAN - Shape of you
Coldplay - All I Can Think About Is You
taylor swift - look what you made me do
beck - wow
How the Humble Lyric Video Went from DIY to Major Label
I
t used to be so simple:
Rudimentary, fan-made YouTube videos of lyrics scrolling, karaoke-style, across the screen. Now, Taylor Swift’s ODD NY-designed “Look What You Made Me Do” lyric video is shattering records (83 million views and counting) and whipping fans into a frenzy without even showing her face—a placeholder for the official video that came out three days later. The humble lyric video has peaked.
But how did this particular monster
get created?
When YouTube became popular, music fans used the site to post DIY videos for bedroom pop stars looking to sing along in real time. The early ones were all utility—large Arial type, solid backgrounds, text scrolling left to right across the screen—but they garnered hits. Lots of hits. Avril Lavigne’s 2007 “When You’re Gone” spawned a fan-made clip that’s been viewed 64 million times.
With numbers like that, it was only a matter of time before the labels got involved, and once Billboard started factoring online views into their chart statistics, labels stepped in to make sure that if any video was going to get millions of views, they were gonna get the credit. So they started making their own, often tossed together in under a week and for less than $10,000.
Naturally, it got out of hand. Budgets and ambitions ballooned (Katy Perry’s "Birthday" spells out the entire song
in cake ingredients) and the lyric video morphed into its own, expensive, monster production that's often better than the official video.
And that brings us here, with lyric videos so bold and innovative they make you wonder why we ever needed an official video in the first place. Here are some recent lyric videos we dig, plus one that may be the original, made in 1965 by Bob Dylan, who seems to have pioneered everything.
