The honest answer is anywhere from under ten pounds to over a hundred thousand, and where you land depends entirely on how the video gets made. Here is what each route actually costs, so you can decide what your song deserves.
The traditional shoot
A professionally produced music video, with a director, camera operator, lighting, a location and an editor, starts around $2,000 to $5,000 at the very low end. That gets you a small crew for a day and a straightforward concept.
A mid-tier video from an established production company typically runs $10,000 to $50,000. Label-backed videos for major artists regularly cost $100,000 or more, and the famous excesses go into the millions.
For an independent artist, the relevant number is the bottom one: even the cheapest real shoot costs more than most unsigned artists earn from the song it promotes.
The budget videographer
One person with a camera, usually $300 to $1,500 for a day of shooting and an edit. This is the classic indie route and it can work well if you find someone whose showreel you like.
The hidden costs are the ones nobody quotes: a location, travel, props, your own time, and reshoots if the edit reveals a problem. A single day of shooting also gives you exactly one video, and short-form platforms punish accounts that post once and vanish.
The lyric video commission
Commissioning a lyric video on a freelance marketplace runs $50 to $500 depending on complexity. Template tools bring that near zero but produce videos that look like the template.
A lyric video is better than nothing, and for some releases it is the right call. What it is not is a performance: nobody is on screen, so there is no face for a viewer to connect with, and on TikTok the face is most of what stops the scroll.
The AI music video
Generating a music video from a photo and a song costs a few pounds per video, not a few thousand. With Muzie you upload a photo of your singer, pick the song section you want, choose a style, and the video is storyboarded, animated and lip-synced for you in minutes. You get free tokens when you sign up, so the first video costs nothing at all.
The economics change what you can do, not just what you spend. At a few pounds per video you can make five versions of the same hook, post all of them, and let the platform tell you which one works. At $2,000 per video you get one shot and you had better guess right.
What each route is for
- Full production shoot: you have a budget, a deadline for a flagship release, and the song is already earning. The video is a brand asset.
- Budget videographer: you want real footage of the real you, and one good video is the goal.
- Lyric video: you need something on YouTube for a release and the budget is spoken for.
- AI music video: you post on TikTok, Reels or Shorts, you release often, and you want a performance video for every song (or several per song) without a production budget.
These are not mutually exclusive. Plenty of artists shoot one real video per year for the single that matters most and generate everything in between.
The cost nobody counts
Time. A shoot takes a day plus scheduling, plus the edit round-trips. A commission takes a week of back and forth. A generated video takes minutes, which means the marginal cost of trying an idea is close to zero.
For a genre where the winning strategy is volume and iteration, that is the number that actually decides whether your song gets seen.