Music DVDs Hot for the Holidays
Jay-Z, Bruce Springsteen, and Radiohead are all planning major holiday releases, but none of them are albums. Music DVDs are often slapped-together collections of old videos, but, increasingly, new releases offer fans worthwhile material. Evanescence‘s CD-DVD package Anywhere But Home, for instance, includes a full Paris concert, interviews and bloopers. “Part of the point of it is to show everybody we’re just normal people goofing around and falling down onstage and being stupid,” says singer Amy Lee. “That’s the fun part.”
So far this year, music-DVD sales have more than doubled to 19.7 million units, according to Nielsen SoundScan. (Though the 2004 DVD market will more than double 2003’s $370 million, it’s still a small fraction of the $12 billion music industry.) “It’s been up a lot for the last three years, but now the numbers are getting fairly serious,” says Jim Urie, president of Universal Music and Video Distribution. “We realize taking a bunch of music videos that have been out and just kind of compiling them is not a compelling product. What is compelling is concert footage and things that haven’t been on MTV.”
Among the biggest fall titles are Radiohead‘s The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time, which features twenty-four unreleased short films; the reissue of Springsteen’s 1992 MTV Plugged, with a new track, “Roll of the Dice”; and the Jay-Z and Linkin Park collaboration Collision Course. “We all had a lot of fun with Jay-Z in the studio – you can see it on the DVD,” says Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park, which has sold 2.3 million copies worldwide of the 2003 DVD Live in Texas. “We were ad-libbing crazy stuff over each other’s parts, joking around the whole time.”
This story is from the November 25th, 2004 issue of Rolling Stone.