To document Cheap Trick’s last-ever show at the Nippon Budokan — the Tokyo arena that helped make the band famous with its At Budokan album in the ’70s — the Rockford, Ill., rockers spent $12,000 on a four-person film crew last October. The resulting music video, “The Best Thing,” a sentimental look at the band’s lengthy relationship with its Japanese fanbase, has drawn 77,000 YouTube views — generating only a fraction of the money necessary to buy one of Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen’s signed five-neck guitars. But revenue wasn’t the point of the exercise.
“You look at it as promotion,” says Dino Paredes, the band’s manager. “The whole point is to capture the relationship between the band and this culture. Clearly, on the business side, it isn’t always a great return on investment.” That said, “The Best Thing” is an “evergreen,” he adds. As for those 77,000 YouTube views, he predicts, “If you and I talk in 10 years, we’ll probably add a couple zeroes to that number.”
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Though MTV, the platform responsible for bringing music videos into the cultural zeitgeist, removed the last of its on-air music video channels three months ago, billions of users still watch them on YouTube every month — not counting the variations displayed on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and other social media. And artists still view the medium as a key promotional tool. “To us, they’re really important,” says Mike Chester, general manager of Warner Records. “We’ll always fund a great idea — and some great ideas cost money to pull off. I always tell the team: ‘It’s not about the money. We’ll double the money. We need an idea.’”
Videos cost from $20,000 to the rare $1 million superstar production, according to Chester, who adds, “I’m not approving $1 million videos very often. Hardly ever.” Others in the music business put the range between $30,000 and $250,000, with occasional big-budget videos costing as much as $850,000. Justin Clough, a Nashville director who has worked with Morgan Wallen, HARDY and Bailey Zimmerman, says the maximum budget is about $400,000. “Well, look, I do everything,” he adds. “If somebody has a cool song and they got $10,000, let’s rip it.”
It’s hard to say how much revenue artists generate from their videos. According to sources at two of the major labels, the U.S. the blended video stream rate for premium, ad-supported official videos and ad-supported, user-generated videos for 2025 was $0.0038 per stream, or $3.80 per 1,000 video streams. So Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia” video, released last October, would have grossed about $1.31 million for its 345 million views and Alex Warren‘s video for “Ordinary,” released on Feb. 25, would have landed roughly $1.25 million for its nearly 328 million views.
But aside from megastar hits, most music videos do not “move the needle,” Lizzo declared on TikTok last September, adding that she made a video for her song “STFU” but released it only on Instagram for this reason. “The golden age of the music video is over. And actually, it’s been over for a long time. There will never be another ‘Thriller,’ ‘Lady Marmalade,’ or ‘Ladies Night,’ because critical mass and mainstream culture just don’t exist anymore,” she said. For this reason, according to Clough, labels have “redisbursed” their video budgets in recent years. “With new artists, it’s really hard to get budgets for videos,” he says. “Now it’s allocated to two small-to-medium-sized videos and 20 days of content shooting. Which stings a little bit.
“I’m not necessarily worried that the music video, as a whole, is going to go away,” he continues. “The shining light on all of this is there’s more video than ever.” And more platforms to showcase them: Last November, streaming giant Spotify began rolling out music videos for its customers in the U.S. and Canada.
In 2024, Clough joined a Zoom with Zimmerman to discuss the rising country star’s planned “New to Country” video, along with Zimmerman’s managers and Clough’s producers. At the start of the call, he was surprised to hear Zimmerman’s first words: “I want explosions!” The resulting video opens with a sketch that sees a music executive complaining about a $2.3 million budget for a music video, including $150,000 for a private jet and $12,000 for “redneck shit.” The video wound up with just 3.6 million YouTube views, but, Clough says, it was valuable for Zimmerman because he used it to market his tour, also called New to Country: “With certain artists, the number is less important than making sure the product is delivered properly.” Similarly, his 2024 video for HARDY’s “Rockstar” may have drawn just 7 million views, but Clough says it “cemented him in the rock space,” helping the singer transition from a pure country audience to a new genre.
Consumption for music videos has increased moderately in recent years, according to Luminate, from 93 billion in 2024 to 96 billion in 2025, and another 19.4 billion through March 19 of this year — not counting user-generated content set to existing songs. And while JP Evangelista, Vevo’s executive vp of content, programming and marketing, observes that “everyone is slightly more cautious now when they are assuming giant, giant video budgets,” his team still identifies 30 “mass-budget” videos per year costing an estimated $750,000 to more than $1 million. “That hasn’t slowed down,” he says. “It still comes from large-scale, tier-A artists where they feel like they can justify the investment and hire a mass-scale director.”
Stephen Bryan, YouTube’s global head of label partnerships, adds that music videos in the TikTok era have more diversified uses than just airing in full to artists’ superfans, classic-MTV-style. Many artists these days release multiple pieces of video content, big and small, from spontaneous behind-the-scenes iPhone footage to live clips to dance videos to remixes to excerpts from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon or NPR’s Tiny Desk. “When we talk with our partners, we talk about how all those pieces can come together in an effective campaign to release a new song, then extending through the promotional cycle,” Bryan says. “In many ways, music videos are more important, really, than ever before.”
