Short answer: you need video. You probably do not need a music video in the traditional sense.
Those are different things, and conflating them is why a lot of independent artists spend money in the wrong place.
What changed
For decades a music video was one expensive artefact. You saved up, you shot it once, it premiered, and it lived on YouTube.
Then discovery moved to short-form. TikTok, Reels and Shorts do not want a four-minute narrative piece. They want a fifteen-second clip, and they want a new one frequently. The economics inverted completely: what matters now is not how good one video is, but how many you can make.
Why you cannot skip video entirely
Every platform where music is discovered requires a moving picture. You cannot upload audio to TikTok. You cannot post an MP3 to Reels. Spotify surfaces tracks to people already looking for them, which is not discovery.
So the choice is not video or no video. It is your video or somebody else's, because if a track spreads at all, it spreads attached to footage.
What to make instead
Rather than one expensive video, make:
- Five to ten hook clips. Fifteen seconds each, same hook, different visual worlds. These are your actual marketing.
- A Spotify Canvas. Eight seconds, loops, comes free with the same visual language.
- A lyric video. For YouTube search, which pays out slowly and forever.
- One longer piece, if and only if the song warrants it and you have the assets already.
Notice the order. The traditional music video is last, and it is optional.
When a real music video is still worth it
There are cases:
- The song is the campaign centrepiece and everything else hangs off it
- You have a genuinely strong visual concept that needs length to work
- The video is the art, not the marketing, which is a completely legitimate reason
- A label or sync opportunity requires one
Outside those, a single expensive video is usually the least efficient thing you can spend a release budget on.
The volume problem, and why it is solvable now
The obvious objection to "make ten videos" is that ten videos used to cost ten times as much as one.
That is no longer true. Generating a music video takes minutes, which means the strategy that actually works, high volume and fast iteration, is now available to someone with no budget at all. That is the real shift, and most independent artists have not adjusted to it yet.
The artists who have are the ones posting five times a week with a coherent visual identity, and they are outperforming much better funded releases doing it.