Copyright Permission

The copyright holder for 'Secrets' turned out to be the band's lead singer and writer, Ryan Tedder. This is the letter we sent to him asking for permission to use the song, 'Secrets' for our project.

Chosen Song - Secrets, One Republic

The final choice of song that we made was 'Secrets' by the alternative rock band, One Republic. Before we can completely confirm this as a song choice, we are sending a letter to the writer/producer of the song asking for permission to use it which I will put in the next post.

Reasons for choice

Secrets - One Republic has a number of qualities that our group wanted in a song and presented good opportunities to create an exciting video.

• It lends itself well to a performance style video as the instruments are prominent and can be fittingly brought in throughout a video. This means that at different points in the song where certain instruments are privileged they can be shown in a video for a powerful effect.
• It has a unique sound with the use of different instruments like the cello and violin. This will not only make our music video stand out (with focuses on diverse instruments) but also help to create a 'feel' for the band. There is also an absence of guitars which also contributes to this.
• The song is not too fast. This allows us to set a calm scene with greater focus on each individual sound. It also allows us to have more flexibility with our locations in regards to filming. This is because fast songs tend to feel as though the video should involve a live concert.

Album Sales Trends

Over recent years, trends in music sales have begun to make a change toward a more digital market. In 2009 the BBC wrote an article about the fall in album sales giving way to a rise in digital sales. Overall album sales had decreased by 3.5% over the year despite downloaded album sales increasing massively by 56.1% consisting of 1 eighth of the total sold. This has become a growing trend and 2011 became the sixth year in a row where album sales have dropped. Despite this trend, singles sales are still increasing. In 2009 152 million singles were sold (up by 32.7% from the previous year) with 98% of those being digital downloads.

One of the most insteresting things in regards to albums is that none of the top 50 highest grossing albums were released after 2000. Michael Jackson's Thriller tops the list with 110 million estimated copies sold worldwide - over doubling the next highest; Back in Black by AC/DC at 49 million.

Music Video - Song Candidates

Before choosing song candidates to create our music video to, we first made up some guidelines on the style and type of songs that we wanted. To do this a number of things had to be decided:

• Performance or narrative based
• Genres
• Artists
• Song choices

At first our group had wanted to create a narrative-based video. However, after looking into different existing narrative and performance based videos we decided that it would be a better idea to make a performance video. Reasons for this include:

1. Performers were easier to obtain than good actors
2. Most songs lend themselves more to performance based videos
3. Easier to avoid cliche and bad end products
4. Less locations would be necessary to obtain

Once we chose this we moved on to music genres. The consensus in our group was that we should choose a genre from which a performance video would lend itself most to. Most rock style music videos that exist at the moment are semi or solely performance based, clearly showing in each video the band's energy and drive with their music. This genre clearly was a good choice to look into further, and as we did so we started to look at different sub-genres. Alternative rock was an area that sparked our interest as it still lent itself very well to performance style videos, but also had varied sounds and instruments within that weren't typical of normal rock music. We considered this as a good thing because we'd be able to create a unique video that stood out among others. This also, however, will create challenges later on when finding musicians that can play these instruments, but I will talk about these in a later post.

We looked at several artists within the alternative rock genre (and the rock genre for good measure) including Red Hot Chile Peppers, Gorillaz, One Republic, Arctic Monkeys, Bon Jovi, The Verve, Nirvana and the Oasis. Three songs stood out in particular for us from these artists:

1. The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony
2. One Republic - Secrets
3. Bon Jovi - It's My Life

All three of these songs fit a performance style video and have their own unique sound using various techniques and instruments that would make for an interesting video.