I couldn’t find comparable statistics on the number of music videos (i.e., short films set to a single piece of music, usually for the purpose of promoting sale of the audio recording).
I was wondering if the number of music videos would be higher or lower than the number of feature-length films. On the one hand, music videos didn’t really take off until the advent of dedicated music TV channels in the 1980s, whereas feature films have been around for over a hundred years now. On the other hand, music videos are usually much faster and cheaper to make, have been around for a lot longer than MTV, and have probably been commissioned for a large proportion of popular music singles since the 1980s. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that music videos are being produced at a much faster rate than feature films today, though I don’t know if that’s been true for long enough for them to be more numerous now in absolute numbers.
It’s virtually guaranteed to be films. Early movies were often recorded in a couple of days or weeks, and everybody wanted in on the new fad. Georges Meliés alone is known to have directed more than 500 films in about 20 years.
The earliest movies, including (as far as I know) the entirety of Méliès’s output, were short films. My question is about feature-length productions, which are by convention at least 40 minutes long.
No argument here. But please, when I use terms such as “feature-length” in this thread, let’s all pretend that I’m using English as she is spoke in 2018, not 1902.
The Australian Broadcasting Commission has a music program called Rage, which runs all Friday and Saturday night and has done for 30 years. All the playlists are online, and they have recently been compiled into an app. linking to YouTube clips. The figure cited is 200,000 clips, and I’m choosing to read this as 200K individual songs, rather that total plays.
If that figure is good, while Rage is eclectic its not that wide-ranging in its tastes, so it would not include much at all country + western, any non-charting singles outside the independent / alt scene, clips for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th possible singles from well-backed albums, very little of the non-English speaking world. Taken together, I’d easily believe 500K+ total, daylight second, then movies.
One thing, which probably doesn’t skew the figures that much, is that most songs pre mid-1980s are still mainly represented as cut-down studio or concert performances rather than video clips, which may or may not fit your definition of music vids.
This clipby national treasure Jon Safran will show you just how easy it is to [a] make a music video and ** how easy it was to get complete shite onto the Australian national broadcaster as part of the total.
It’s estimated that there are about 500,000 movies still existing at the moment:
This is just the narrative fiction feature-length, theatrical-cinema films which have some copy still in existence, although it may be in an archive where it hasn’t been shown for a long time. What counts as a movie for you? Do you count documentaries? I frequently see documentaries in movie theaters where narrative films are being shown in the other screens in that theater. Do you count movies originally made for television? Some films made for television in one country are shown in theaters in other countries.
There are probably lots of films that were made and disappeared before there was any permanent record made of their existence in the early days, so they aren’t in the IMDb. Also, back in those days, there was no clear distinction between feature films and shorts. I suspect that even today there are amateurs making films that are of feature length which don’t get seen by anyone not in the cast, crew, their friends and relatives, and maybe a few people at an amateur film festival, and I suspect that those films don’t get recorded in the IMDb.
I think a better but still really rough estimate is that there are about a million films satisfying your definitions.
No. Per the link in my OP, television movies, TV shows, direct-to-video releases, and shorts are all excluded. Documentaries are in as long as they don’t fall into one of the aforementioned categories.
I’m having a hard time seeing how it wouldn’t be music videos. A movie features hundreds of performers, is hours long, and a prolific movie-maker will usually only make one a year. A music video features maybe five performers, is minutes long, and a music-maker can easily make a dozen in a year. Albums vs. movies might be more comparable, but even then, many movies get their soundtracks released as albums.
psychonaut, which of my questions are you saying “no” to? I asked several questions. One of them was whether you counted documentaries, and it appears you’ve said “yes” to that question. It appears that you have said “no” to made-for-TV movies, but some movies are shown on TV in some countries and in theaters in other countries. For instance, consider the 1971 movie Duel. It was shown on TV in the U.S. and Canada, but it was released in theaters in pretty much every other country in the world. Do you count any shorts? What length defines a short? The Sundance Film Festival says that any film shorter than 50 minutes is a short, while a film has to be shorter than 40 minutes to be eligible for the shorts categories at the Academy Awards. I can’t find anywhere that it says what the IMDb counts as a short, but looking at the lengths given for shorts it appears that they count anything less than 45 minutes. Do you count direct-to-DVD (or direct-to-internet-streaming) films? These days there are occasional simultaneous releases to theaters, DVDs, and internet streaming. What does a simultaneous release count as? There used to be, at least, films that were not theatrical, video, or TV films, although they did get seen by a reasonable number of people and weren’t counted by the IMDb. For instance, there was a strong tradition of filmmakers making religious-themed films which they would show (on movie screens) in churches, schools, and church-related conferences. They got seen by a lot of people even though they weren’t released in ordinary theaters. Do those count? There were other examples of groups making amateur full-length films that never got shown in theaters.
Anyone can make an amateur video of an amateur band or record a live performance, just like any film student can make a movie. Do we want to count those as videos and films? Do we count videos that were produced as part of a TV show or movie, or just the ones that were produced specifically to stand alone?
If you only want to count authorized videos produced to promote songs released by record labels, I really doubt there are even 1,000 released per year, and there’s no way in hell there would’ve been an average of 10,000 per year for the last 50 years.
Elton John is credited with118 music videos since 1970. Find 4,000 more Elton Johns and then we’re talking competitive numbers.
More like between 3500-8000. But that’s just America, and other countries will all add up - Japan and Korea especially - there are hundreds of bands in many different genres, and with the J-Pop and K-pop genres especially, often they don’t just release one version of a video per song. There’s the dance video, and the story video, and the “live” performance video…
Then there’s all that Euro EDM, and the stripperific Eastern European music scene. Even developing nations like South Africa and Nigeria - both have large indigenous markets that release hundreds of (terrible quality) videos a year.