Gosh, it’s tough writing all these posts about liking music lately. Why? Because I typically don’t like new music. Especially new music owned by large record labels and played on commercial radio.

As I mentioned on Tuesday, I’ve been enjoying Jay-Z and Alicia Keys over and over every night. That’s satisfying this itch me ears seem to be having to listen to new music with good beats.

That is, until Neil (@ninjarunner — awesome guy) IMed me and showed me the music video for Rihanna’s latest song “Hard“.

I’ve never liked Rihanna’s music at all (we used to play one of her albums at the store I worked in), but I’ve been playing this song over and over for the past few days because the beat screams #crushit!

There’s very little imagination used in the video. In a nutshell, Rihanna is surrounded by tanks, guns, helicopters, and lots of other military equipment. I can only imagine how much money this video would have cost to make. (I can’t find any information about the budget of it online.)

I’ll write a blog post some time about my feelings on war, but after seeing the behind the scenes video and reading the lyrics (I can never understand what half the musicians these days are singing) I realised there are one or two creative parts.

I definitely love the Mickey Mouse ears. The leotard/g-string is definitely not needed. Yeah, yeah, yeah (Ah yeah, yeah yeah) I realise she’s hot, sexy, etc, but — just like Britney — I don’t think this kind of stuff needs to be seen by anyone under the age of eighteen. Okay, I’ll compromise: sixteen.

Seriously, kids are getting smart at younger ages and that’s a good thing, but they shouldn’t be tainted by the explicit images (war, sex, adult themes; crotch grabbing) when they could be furthering their knowledge of how to build a civilisation on Mars.

You think I’m joking? Far from it.

If you don’t care about the adult themes, then at least think about the money involved. I guarantee the same video could be created by indie filmmakers/artists for a fraction of the cost.

Think of it this way: Say a record label allows a $200,000 budget for a music video. Imagine if $30,000 (that’s A LOT of money; a professional video camera (e.g. Canon 7D) is ~$2,000) is used to make the video — we need “entertainment”, right? Then the remaining $170,000 was invested at a fixed interest rate. If all music videos did this, there would be a lot of money in that account.

What would happen to the money in that investment account? One word: Aid. (Well, and paying back debt.)

The tragedy in Haiti was something no one could prepare for. People across the world have united and donated millions of dollars in aid to the rehabilitation of the region. Google donated $1 Million, Australia donated $10 Million, and I think everyone on Twitter has retweeted the numbers you can text to donate $10 or $5 (charged to your phone bill).

That’s truly a giving effort in such a short span of time!

But how many music videos are made every year? 1,500?

255 Million Dollars!

Mother nature’s disasters are rarely predictable and often cause tragedy. Imagine if we were a little more prepared — money-wise.

Of course, this could work for more than just music videos. Did James Cameron’s Avatar really need to cost ~$500 Million?

I think if the unessential aspects of our lives just tried to save a few bucks here and there, then we could help out people in need a lot sooner.

What do you think?

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