In the indie music world, a proper music video often starts around fifteen to thirty thousand yuan. For many musicians, that number is a door.
It is not always impossible to pay. It is that the pain is real. If recording an EP costs eight thousand and the video costs another twenty thousand, how much traffic does the song need before the investment makes sense? Most people do the math and step back.
That is why independent music often has a strange mismatch: good songs with weak visual presentation. The release becomes a static cover, a live-room clip, or a phone recording. Not because musicians do not care, but because they cannot afford the visual layer.
What LickMV solves is part of this problem. I say “part” because I do not want to oversell it. There is still a gap between an AI director and a human director. AI does not know the exact story behind your song. It responds to emotional patterns, not to the full history of who you are.
The value is not that AI replaces a director. The value is that it gives people who had no chance of making a video a first visual version.
That does not mean audiences are shallow. It means the competition for attention is intense. You have to give people a reason to stop first.
A first music video, even an imperfect one, is stronger than having none at all.
The old advice was to wait until you had enough money. Today the answer is changing. Tools change, opportunities change, but the sincerity inside the song remains something AI cannot generate.
Now you can at least let the song appear in the world as a complete work. That alone is worth something.
For indie musicians: how do you handle the MV stage when releasing a song? Have AI tools helped yet?