What I’ve been up to lately: Monetizing Music in a Free Economy video series

Writing is my first love.  My dream is to do it for a living.  However, during my junior year at UTD, I started getting really into video.  Making videos involves crafting stories and engaging the viewer, just like writing.  Editing is a very zen practice – clip, drag, render, repeat – and I love just zoning out on Final Cut, making my videos look cool.

How cool are they, you ask?  Let me show you.  This is a project I’ve been working on with one of my professors; he’s working on a documentary about how to make money in the music industry, and he sent me out into the wilderness with a camera to interview musicians about this topic.  I took the best interviews (for the record, the quality of the interviews was entirely based on the subjects – my interviewing skills are a work in progress) and edited them together in a series of video shorts.

The first episode features John Baldwin Gourley from Portugal. the Man and Dana Strum from Slaughter:

Dana and John had both just finished playing shows when I interviewed them.  One of my friends told me that I asked good questions but didn’t really reach any conclusions with this video.  I think that some of the points my subjects were trying to make were more implicit, so I figured that, as the filmmaker, my role was to spell it out for the viewer, and I did, via text, in the next episode, which features Joey Allen from Warrant and Chris Evans from the Hanna Barbarians:

Now it’s your turn.  What do you think of what these people said?  What are your opinions on these topics?  How is my editing?  What would you like to hear from musicians about this topic?  Do you have suggestions for other questions I might ask in future interviews?