i wonder if the way harry's deal works he gets to pay for the mv and make the video and after that it needs approval and thats where the issues came up and the mv was put aside and just the abstract video used in the tour videos?
i am by no means an expert on music deals, but i think, yes, any big label would exercise veto rights on tracklists, singles, music videos, and the likes. that’s why medicine isn’t on any tracklist and i guess we should be lucky we even got two ghosts.
i would imagine though, that music video budgets are part of the bigger promo budget which is not on the artist himself, and also that no one would pay for the production of a music video they didn’t expect to be releasing in the end and there would be a pre-approval of the concept. the musician and video artist would come up with an idea and would have to convince their label that this is a good one and would speak to the market. after pre-approval they would then work more closely together on the details. harry will have certain restrictions (he cannot be explicit) but is always trying to push the boundaries of where he can go with that.
so i think it’s likely things went more like this: the larger concept (“barren landscape immersed by lava, harry standing in lava”) was approved, but then when, in the end product, harry was standing there in a long shirt/dress and the lava was multi-coloured, someone with veto rights saw it, made the same connections that we do, thought other people would make those connections too, didn’t want that, and said no.
their thinking would have been “i don’t care how much we have already paid for the production of this video, promoting the single with it, will cost us more than not promoting it with a video at all”
all of the thinking on the part of the industry rests on 1. money 2. assumptions about what the general public will do. while money is quantifiable and the reasoning may be rational, the assumptions are what’s to be questioned here. the music industry is older white men. who were raised in a homophobic system and have homophobic assumptions about what the general public will do.
and that’s where our power comes in. we don’t have a lot of it, but social media gave us some. we need to USE THE HELL out of our power and our social media to show the homophobic music industry that homophobia is a thing of the past and that we, the younger public, are NOT homophobic and would pay for Harry’s, and other non straight artists’ music and tickets regardless. we need to show them that there is a large, like much larger than you’d expect, non straight public that you can also market to, and who are CRAVING for an idol like Harry, and other non straight musicians. that any breadth would be compensated by far in depth of commitment. Harry has seen that, and that makes him more powerful in his negotiations so we need to continue to be loud about this for him and any other artist we care about that we feel needs this.
we need to be as visible as we possibly can, with our LGBTQ+ identities and our LGBTQ+ support, at every concert, and on social media - to make eachother strong. we don’t just deserve to be here. we deserve representation. as a community, we deserve it, that some of us who are talented become succesfull, without having to compromise on our identities, or our visibility as part of this community.
