Why are AMV's so rockcentric? Perplexed.

[Jedinovice]

[No offense intended to any editor mind!]

Something I do not get. Whenever I look for an AMV, odds are it will be a rock or acoustic guitar. I'm saying that rick/guitar is bad for AMVs per say, it's just that it's almost always, er, rock/guitar.

I don't get it. Not only is techno - in its various forms - generally more popular than rock/guitar these days...
...anime and techno were made for each other!

A lot of the AMVs I see, the music just does not 'gel' with the content. Rock certain works for horror/battle - but that's not my taste.
But I feel the techno/synth generally works better and, if meshed well, techno works

I got so frustrated with the really, really good cuts but with music that I felt was not suited and overlaying another techno/synth sound track which ofte, in my opinion, worked better... just so I could enjoy the edtors work on my laptop. (I never post someone elses work as my own. This is just for my personal entertainment.

I put this to some of my students - the anime fans (who are keen for me to start my planned anime club, though I will have to change employer to have a hope of running it...) and they were completely with me. They were there ahead of me...

Most AMV's are rock.guitar
and
Techno generally works better but few do it.

Why the bias?
My students explained to me that Rock music is very, very popular in Japan so its possible people are following a Japanese tradition.
Is that the case?

I confess that I am delaying on giving feedback on a few AMV's here because my thought is, "Well, it's OK but the music doesn't fit."

Example: youtube 'stein;s gate' AMV's. Being about time travel, the series is screaming techno/synth. It's science fiction!
ALL rock.guitar! ALL???!!
And it doesn't work. So I overlay a synth soundtrack and the AMV's come to life.

Or is it me? and my students? I mean, techno/sythn AMVs exist (I make them!) but it's a 9:1 ratio as far as I can see - and hear.

[Tigrin]

Because techno sucks.

In all seriousness, techno songs are kind of long with repetitive lyrics... unless you're making a video based around a concept or motif (off the top of my head, maybe "Quantum Ripples" or "A Salty Stick"), it doesn't really make much sense to use techno or synthesized music like that... a lot of AMVs are lyric or story driven. Rock probably gets used a lot both because it has hard beats that are easy to sync to and often has lyrics that go with pretty much anything.

Who cares what kind of music it is as long as the AMV works well? There have been a number of AMVs I've seen that I would have never listened to that music or thought of using it otherwise, but the editor made it work.

[Koopiskeva]

Funny, because it seems to me that Techno is the second-most used type of music for AMVs, not far behind Rock. Perhaps its just the type of AMV/Anime you are searching for? Even if not true, there are plenty of techno/dance AMVs out there, though they do tend to be using multi-anime sources - probably to keep up the pace of the music by stabbing you in the eyes with constant visual changes.

Really, Rap, Country, and other genres are much more under-represented than techno.

Of course, this is coming from me, who started off making AMVs mostly to techno music. :p

[CrackTheSky]

For the last year and a half I've been working on the AMV Genome Project, and one of the things I'm tracking is music genre in AMVs. Of the 1,241 videos I've entered into the database, 555 of them do not use rock-based music. Now, this encompasses a huge range of musical styles such as classical, jazz, swing, pop, hip-hop, glitch, etc., not just "techno", but it's interesting to note that almost half of those videos do not use guitar-based music. (BTW, if you want to just include "techno" or other electronic music subgenres such as trance, synthpop or house, the number of videos is still almost 300 -- not near the 9:1 ratio you mentioned).

There are plenty of electronic music-based AMVs out there, and they are not at all difficult to find. I think in recent years especially, the number of electronic music-based AMVs has grown somewhat, especially as pop music has gotten more and more electronic over the years and there are always plenty of pop music AMVs, regardless of the year.

In all seriousness, techno songs are kind of long with repetitive lyrics... unless you're making a video based around a concept or motif (off the top of my head, maybe "Quantum Ripples" or "A Salty Stick"), it doesn't really make much sense to use techno or synthesized music like that... a lot of AMVs are lyric or story driven.

Disagree with this entirely, unless you're just talking about straight-up techno like this or this. But to indict all synthesized music is kinda silly -- that eliminates all kinds of electropop and trance and plenty of other electronic music that conveys ranges of emotions in the same way rock and other music do, and plenty of it has lyrics. Electronic music has at least equal potential to tell a story as compared to most rock music, IMO.

[Rider4Z]

A couple years ago at Anime Expo there was a sudden splurge of techno finalists, not just dance videos but in action and drama as well. A lot of people later griped "too much dub step". lol

I personally can't edit to techno songs because I've never heard one that I made an emotional connection with. Probably because the music is artificially produced on a computer and therefor robotic.

[Tigrin]

Disagree with this entirely, unless you're just talking about straight-up techno like this or this. But to indict all synthesized music is kinda silly -- that eliminates all kinds of electropop and trance and plenty of other electronic music that conveys ranges of emotions in the same way rock and other music do, and plenty of it has lyrics. Electronic music has at least equal potential to tell a story as compared to most rock music, IMO.

Yeah I was thinking more of the straight up "wub wub" type of techno or electronica with no or minimal lyrics and not the sort that has become almost mainstream in popular music, like Calvin Harris or Kygo or something. I wasn't saying that electronic music is impossible to create a story to, it's just harder, which is why I surmised that maybe it's not used as much for storytelling as maybe rock music is.

I agree with Koopiskeva that there are other genres much more underrepresented like country. I wonder if that has something to do with the overlap between country music fans and anime fans... it's not as if country music is unpopular (country singers win televised singing competitions all the time for instance), but maybe it's just not as mainstream? Outside of turncoats like Taylor Swift.

[CrackTheSky]

I agree with Koopiskeva that there are other genres much more underrepresented like country. I wonder if that has something to do with the overlap between country music fans and anime fans... it's not as if country music is unpopular (country singers win televised singing competitions all the time for instance), but maybe it's just not as mainstream? Outside of turncoats like Taylor Swift.

I think it's in the same category as hip-hop -- both genres are extremely popular but tend to have super-specific lyrical content, which would make anything except very focused scene selection look goofy. And considering there aren't many anime that deal with the lyrical themes found in country music, it makes sense that there aren't too many country music AMVs.

[Veritas-X]

In my opinion, it might help if you think of AMV's like mini movies; with the music being the soundtrack to the movie. Rock fits action (or even semi-action) movies, techno/electronic/edm/etc. music all kind of fit more of the comic book eye candy movie genre in my opinion. With rock you get the feelings and adrenaline that people want in AMV's along with plot/story in most cases that people can relate to and connect with. Whereas like a comic book movie, you don't really go for the plot, just for the visual stimulation and kid like enjoyment. There isn't as much emotional attachment or connection to the eye candy movies. Rock gives a much broader range to work with in terms of what you can do with the amv/movie.

Yes you can have some absolutely amazing electronic AMV's, just like comic book eye candy movies. Yes you might have a favorite bunch of amv's/movies that all fit the techno/electronic genre and they might be super popular and trend setting; but from an editors standpoint it's a bit more difficult to make a movie using electronic music for the soundtrack, rather than something like rock because electronic doesn't have the story/plot and range to work with most of the time like rock does.

Once again, this is just all my opinion. It makes sense to me and this view might not work for you or others, but it might help bring some perspective to your original questions.

[UnluckyArtist]

I think it can be broken down to demographics. I don't know how the number of US made AMVs compare to the rest of the world but I know rock music is the most popular genre in the US. About half the US population are male. We can safely assume that the majority of American rock listeners are males, and then if you consider all the anime fans between the ages of 13 and 25 and pull out those who actually edit, most of them have to listen to rock more than any other genre and most editors just edit to their favorite songs and anime, this explains why theres so many rock amvs for Naruto and DBZ, two of the most popular anime ever, at least in the states.

If most editors consider rock as their favorite genre there has to be a ton of them, and if there's a ton of them and they must impact the whole world to the point where the bar of an AMV is set at a rock/action video. If that's what everyone thinks of when they think of an AMV, then everyone else will try to meet that bar as an editor, even if rock isn't their favorite genre. This will make even more rock videos. I would assume that across the world, most people would put rock music in their top 3 favorite genres, editors start out working with what they know and matching other videos. So there you go.

[lloyd9988]

I think it can be broken down to demographics. I don't know how the number of US made AMVs compare to the rest of the world but I know rock music is the most popular genre in the US. About half the US population are male. We can safely assume that the majority of American rock listeners are males, and then if you consider all the anime fans between the ages of 13 and 25 and pull out those who actually edit, most of them have to listen to rock more than any other genre and most editors just edit to their favorite songs and anime, this explains why theres so many rock amvs for Naruto and DBZ, two of the most popular anime ever, at least in the states.

If most editors consider rock as their favorite genre there has to be a ton of them, and if there's a ton of them and they must impact the whole world to the point where the bar of an AMV is set at a rock/action video. If that's what everyone thinks of when they think of an AMV, then everyone else will try to meet that bar as an editor, even if rock isn't their favorite genre. This will make even more rock videos. I would assume that across the world, most people would put rock music in their top 3 favorite genres, editors start out working with what they know and matching other videos. So there you go.

This one I'd agree with.

I'd also like to note, probably, that making rock amv's doesn't take too much thought. Maybe a bunch of work putting scenes together but, with rock, you can just mix action scenes together when the rock gets heavy. Thus, conceptually, it may be easier to edit with rock than other genres because most anime, even comedy, has at least some type of action-looking scenes. idk, I digress.