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What is a Lyric Video?

November 20, 2024
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6 min

Danielle Overdevest

What is a Lyric Video?

Lyric Videos are their own genre, much like music has genres. The ways in which artists promote and share their art are vast and varied. Lyric Videos are distinct from music videos; while both seek to emphasize the artist's story, music videos focus more heavily on the acting, actors, sets, and production of the video, creating a movie for a song. Lyric videos emphasize the audio of a song and the written aspects that tell the story through chorus, verses, and bridges. 

Originally, lyric videos were composed of plain written lyrics, musical audio, and graphical elements like images. Now more commonly, videos are included, as well as more complex animations and graphical elements. These are the basic building blocks to create lyric videos. Like most things, with time, lyric videos have gotten more and more complex in terms of the additional components you can add and the style, design, and role they play in music promotion. 

In this blog, we'll discuss what are lyric videos, how to decide between lyric videos and music videos, and how artists who create lyric videos can gain reap financial advantages and promote their music.

Should You Make a Lyric Video or a Music Video?

Lyric and music videos are equally important to artists, from DIY independent artists to A-lister billboard charting musicians like Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift. Both play essential roles in music promotion. However, when constrained by time, budget, and capacity, independent artists must make tradeoffs when choosing whether to create lyric or music videos. 

The critical difference between the two formats is that lyric videos' primary focus is to present the song lyrics visually engagingly, with lyric animations and graphic elements. Whereas music videos focus on showcasing a physical performance of the song, they can be expanded beyond the song itself, much like the All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor's Version) (From the Vault) short film by Taylor Swift. 

The key consideration here is that music videos have expanded opportunities for creativity and have vastly higher cost and time-effort tradeoffs than lyric videos, which can be quickly produced at a professional quality through lyric video software with varied but accessible pricing points. 

Making Music Videos 

Music videos, at any production level, require extensive equipment and personnel. The obvious, of course, is the creative components, like the choreography, conceptualization, and storyboarding. There are also the technical components of camera equipment, lighting, audio, sound systems, and editing software for post-production. The human capital required is also highly extensive; most music videos would need additional actors, directors, and cinematography specialists, among other production people. Additionally, because they are focused on telling a narrative, music videos often require scouted locations and sets that require initial investments. 

Logistically, music videos require tremendous coordination efforts, budgeting, scheduling, and necessary permits, among other administrative work, to ensure that production is smooth and effective. Making music videos is a labor-intensive process that, while giving higher creative freedom, can come at extremely high costs financially, mentally, and physically. 

Making Lyric Videos

As we discussed earlier, lyric videos have 3 key components. When you create a lyric video, you need the lyrics, the audio, and some imagery, such as photos or videos. If you take a DIY route, you can make a decent-quality lyric video from these essential components. However, creating professional, high-quality lyric videos is often easier than a DIY approach- especially for artists who need the necessary technology and video editing skills. To automatically add lyrics to a video, you'd need to leverage a lyric video software that can easily make lyric videos.  These tools, often called lyric video makers, are designed specifically to add lyrics in videos synchronized to your music.  The prices can vary depending on which tool you use and what level of customization you receive.  When you create lyric videos in Musixmatch Pro, you can make a video for $49 and customize it according to your preferences.

The Musixmatch Pro Lyric Video Maker uses your synchronized lyrics from Spotify and Apple Music to add lyrics to videos automatically, then empowers you to leverage our templates or design and customize the lyric video as you envision it. 

Advantages of Lyric Videos

The advantages and benefits of lyric videos are vast. We've discussed the top 9 benefits of lyric videos before. Here, we will highlight two key advantages of lyric videos; cost-effectiveness and revenue maximization. 

Lyric Videos are Cost Effective

Lyric videos are a cost-effective way to promote your music. You can easily produce and share lyric videos for all your songs without heavy financial and time investments. Lyric videos can also be a signal for where you should invest in producing more content; if you release your album, for example, with lyric videos, you can consider which videos gain more traction to decide to pursue it further with a follow-up music video, ensuring that you invest in the most efficient ways.  

Lyric Videos Can Create Additional Revenue

The next significant advantage of lyric videos is creating additional revenue streams. In addition to improving your fan reach and enriching your audience's experience, lyric videos allow you to develop monetizable content on platforms like YouTube. When you create lyric videos for all of your song releases and add them to sites, you increase your streams and create the opportunity to monetize your music in another way. 

Making the Most of Your Lyrics 

Traditional music videos play a significant role in musical storytelling and will remain extremely relevant to artists. Lyric videos, however, are the perfect bridge for artists to make engaging and entertaining video content without breaking the bank. You can also promote your music in a new way, rather than through a music-first approach; with lyric videos, you can highlight your words. 

Bringing Your Lyrics to Life 

How can you bring your lyrics to life? The easiest and most effective way is with lyric video software that automatically empowers you to add lyrics to videos. The Musixmatch Pro Lyric Video Maker makes adding lyrics to videos effortless. With Musixmatch Pro, you can distribute and synchronize your lyrics for significant streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and Instagram. Once you've uploaded your lyrics, you can create lyric videos and share them across multiple platforms in a few minutes. 

Create lyric videos effortlessly with Musixmatch Pro. Get started.

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