(Proud smirk) See the wordplay we did? Sometimes we amaze ourselves. 😀 Now speaking seriously, you are running your efforts into a dead-end when you decide to feature firearms in your music videos. It’s become international law and a cultural guideline to avoid promoting visuals displaying guns. The only ones getting a pass are movies. But that’s the difference, you’re a musician shooting music videos. There are severe consequences of you engaging in open display of lethal weapons like firearms in your visual content. Read on to discover exactly and precisely why that is sincerely a terrible idea for any music artist regardless of the nature of the message you’re sending.
5. No Viable Ways Of Promoting Your Material.
If you’ve already engaged in featuring firearms in your music videos, you know how hard it is to push that video on any reputable platform. Even if your music video was to show police brutality and condemn violence, if you openly displayed guns, you’re in the wrong. With the booming number of independent media and self-funded journalists, it truly is not your job to report the news. By all means, stand for what you believe in and against what you think is wrong but do remember you are a musician and there are limits to what you portray in your visuals. No major platform will allow any form of advertising your music video and won’t organically push it to your subscribers either. So YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Google – out of question.
4. No monetization From The Biggest Platforms.
Just like you won’t be allowed to advertise your visual, you also won’t be allowed to natively monetize it. So let’s say you upload the music video on your YouTube channel and then manually send the link to hundreds of your followers so that they can go watch it. In a normal scenario, you would get some coins for the ads being displayed at the beginning of the video and/or for the clicks you get on the ad banners. Now, however, because you show a gun, all of that is out the window. You won’t get any return on your investment because there won’t be any means to directly monetize your effort.
3. Wrong Message From All Perspectives.
What do guns do in the hands of the oppressors? Kill. What do guns do in the hands of the defenders? Kill. So using common sense, guns, per general rule, KILL. So what is it so vital about you needing to visually promote a tool for killing? Seriously, this is bad from whatever angle you look at it.
We made it a day-one rule at Blue Rhymez Entertainment to NEVER feature music videos that show firearms and trust us, there were a lot of desperate artists in need for promotion (duh! read points 5 and 4 to know why) offering us good money for doing otherwise. But we put our money where our mouth is at and we refused over and over again any material of the kind. Now, these characters don’t approach us anymore because our reputation is doing its job in selecting only the artists whose values align with ours.
TBH, it’s even graver to display guns in your video when you are an artist who has a good reputation because you’ll be validating violence when showing firearms. Your impact of suddenly promoting guns when you never did before, will be tenfold worse than a thug who’s always promoted guns. Think of the future generations and STOP.
2. Alienation Of Future Collaborations And Sponsorships.
Good people work with good people. Bad people work with bad people. Very simple. Now… Who could possibly take an interest in sponsoring an artist promoting guns in his visuals? A firearm dealer? A gun maintenance service? A kingpin? Actually yes, very often it’s drug lords and gang leaders associating themselves with such naive musicians. Just look at the Rap/Trap culture and how most of the famous faces die in shootouts and armed robberies and then the people have the audacity to engage in Pikachu faces when it happens.
No sir and ma’am. They had it coming. Their meteoric rise to the top of the charts while obviously pushing violent messages was not an accident. It was drug money and often blood money that made it happen. Every action will have an equal and proportionate reaction. And if you’re a smart dude/gal, you will not, under any circumstance, ever display guns in your music videos.
1. Potential Ban From Social Media.
While we completely denounce the heavy censorship going on on social media these days, we do agree with banning those who don’t know the very thin line between art and real-life violence. Even if you, yourself, never intended to promote gun violence and did it to just look badass, there are kids watching you and you don’t even know it. They are too easily impressed and subconsciously weak. Your video will immediately be removed and you might get banned from social media platforms the instant a good parent or concerned uncle reports your video as promoting gun violence. And they’d be completely right to do so.
Now ask yourself, is it worth putting ANY dollars into a video that will only hurt your brand equity and musician credibility down the line?
Blue Rhymez Entertainment ©2022
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