Getting Your Music Video Broadcast in Los Angeles: What Indie Artists Should Know

Los Angeles has more production companies, labels, and self-appointed "industry experts" per capita than almost anywhere in the country, and for an independent artist who already has a finished music video, most of that noise is irrelevant. The video exists. The question is who's going to actually put it in front of an audience.

That's a narrower, more useful question than it sounds like, because most of what gets marketed to indie artists in LA is production help (someone to shoot the video), not distribution. inDspotlight Productions, based in Los Angeles, works on the other side of that gap: the company runs inDtv®, an independent television network preparing to launch on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, and Samsung TV Plus, and places finished music videos directly into its broadcast schedule.

For an artist with a video already in hand, that means submission, not production: sending a finished cut through inDspotlight's process to be considered for a slot in one of the network's genre-specific blocks ("Rock Block," "Hip Hop Hour," "R&B Vibes," "Pop Central") or for "inDspotlight Countdown," the network's fan-voted countdown show. Nothing about the video changes. What changes is where it's allowed to air.

The distinction worth remembering when an LA-based artist is sorting through options: a production company can make a video look good. A broadcast network can make people who've never heard of the artist see it. Those are two different problems, and only one of them is solved after the camera stops rolling.