Vivian Leigh

Pioneer had a division called Laserdisc Corporation of America, also known as LDCA.

They contracted production companies and directors from Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, even London.

And Nori remembers early on, there was one specific directive for these videos.

Brian Raftery again.

Pioneer wanted these narratives to adhere to the vibe and message of the song, but that came with one big stipulation.

The footage used in these videos had to be completely original for copyright purposes.

Pioneer only licensed the music, not the artist's likeness or any existing music video, so you couldn't reference their vision of the song.

There were, of course, a few other minor ground rules of what you could or could not show.

Pioneer also didn't want anything too violent or too salacious.

Sadna Shelly was a producer at LDCA.

She worked with dozens of directors during her time there and was a liaison between the higher-ups at Pioneer and the production companies actually making the videos.

Sadna said that aside from those family-friendly rules, they almost never got any creative notes from the company.

Which also meant that the people making these videos had near complete artistic freedom.

But that beautiful art came with a pretty big limitation.

Pioneer was a huge company with capital to throw behind these new karaoke videos, but not like that much capital.

In the late 80s and 90s, the average cost of a music video on MTV could run $50,000 to $60,000.

These karaoke videos, on the other hand, ranged from $3,600 to $10,000 because, well, this wasn't MTV.

That budget had to cover production costs like locations, camera rentals, film stock and development, props, a crew, actors, and whatever payment you could walk away with for yourself.

So these videos became a real filmmaking test of what directors could do with a micro-budget, limited resources, and the creative wiggle room to go wild.

I mean, when the idea first came to you, were you kind of like, you're going to pay us to do this thing that it seems very clear that do you really need like a high production video?