Author
Alan More
Founder of Videojam
Alan More is the founder of Videojam, an embed-only platform built on the conviction that great music videos shouldn't depend on an algorithm to be found. His writing here is the engineering counterpart to the editorial voice of the site: how the product actually works underneath, how it decides what to surface, how it handles copyright and provenance, and where the honest limits of a small platform's systems are.
Alan More is the founder of Videojam, an embed-only music video discovery platform built around human curation rather than recommendation. He writes the engineering posts, the ones about how the product works underneath. His interest is in the unglamorous parts: provenance over content, deterministic rules over confident guesses, and being able to *show* a process rather than assert one. He is the same real-world music entity as the site's lead curator (the person choosing what the catalog is), which is why the engineering and the curation tend to converge on the same missing field.
Articles
- The First Film Is Something We Invent LaterSix famous early films, and almost every label on them is wrong. What the tidying removes is the collaboration, and that is the interesting part.
- The Spaceship Came Before the RecordAfrofuturism gets read as imagery applied to music. The order the work was made in says the reverse, and it produced a science fiction feature.
- When a Film Has to Carry Music, It Leaves the Real WorldA 1941 afterlife, a 1947 dream western, two recent dystopias. Films built around music keep reaching for the fantastic, and it is structural.
- An LLM Flagged 1,632 Videos. One Was Real.We rebuilt our copyright triage from scratch. An LLM flagged four of five videos. The only signal that worked read who uploaded a video, not its content.
- Why Intimate Live Session Videos Still WinArtist spotlight: live jam and session videos, Sofar-style performances and why the smallest rooms produce the most honest music video.
- Barcelona Outward: A Field Guide to the Open-Air SetThe cinematic open-air DJ set: Korolova, Ben Böhmer, Monolink and Solomun, filmed somewhere extraordinary and built to be watched end to end, not sampled.
- Burna Boy Facts: How a Tiny Coachella Font Created the 'African Giant'Burna Boy turned a small-print insult on a festival poster into an album title, a brand, and a Grammy. Plus the Kanye coincidence that boosted 'Ye' and the Toni Braxton sample in 'Last Last'.
- An Engineer's Love Letter to the Music VideoBetween art film and advertisement, the music video became one of the most inventive visual forms of the last fifty years. A case for loving it openly.
- The State of AI Music in 2026: Where the Dust Is Starting to SettleAn up-to-date, plain-English guide to AI music in 2026: the label settlements, the 'walled garden' standoff, the first AI No.1, new EU labelling rules, and what it all means for real artists and listeners.
- How Independent Artists Can Get Their Music Videos Discovered in 2026Posting and praying isn't a strategy. A grounded, hype-free look at how independent artists actually get their videos found this year, and what's a waste of time.
- Mariah Carey Facts: The Christmas Cash Machine, the Whistle Note, and 'I Don't Know Her'Five gloriously extra facts about Mariah Carey: the Christmas song that earns millions every December, the note only dogs can fully appreciate, the lip-sync that ended 2016, and that 'I don't know her' moment.
- Royalty-Free vs Creative Commons vs Licensed: A Musician's Plain-English GuideThe words 'royalty-free' and 'Creative Commons' get thrown around constantly and mean very different things. A clear, jargon-free guide to what you can actually use, and how.
- What Bookers Actually Look For in an Artist's Video PageThe thirty seconds a booker spends on your page decides everything. Here's what they're really evaluating, and how to pass the test most artists fail without knowing it.
- The Voice on 'Everybody Dance Now' Wasn't the Woman in the Video: The Wild Martha Wash StoryOne of the most famous vocals of the 90s belonged to a singer who was left off the credits and replaced by a model in the video. How Martha Wash fought back, and changed the law.
- How to Make a Great Music Video EPK (and Why You Need One)An electronic press kit is the difference between a booker taking you seriously and never replying. A practical guide to building a video-first EPK that actually gets you booked.
- YouTube Wasn't Built for Discovery: We Built ThisYouTube is the world's largest music video library and one of its worst places to discover music. On the difference between a warehouse and a record store.
- The Case Against the Autoplay Rabbit HoleAutoplay promises endless discovery and delivers a slow drift into sameness. Why the feature that never lets you stop is the enemy of finding anything.
- Why We Curate Instead of Letting an Algorithm DecideRecommendation engines are extraordinary at keeping you watching and terrible at showing you what matters. A case for the human art of curation.
- New Wave's Visual Language Outlived the GenreAngular, ironic, art-school strange: new wave built a visual identity so distinct it escaped the music entirely. The look that outlived its own decade.
- Phil Collins Facts: The 'In the Air Tonight' Myth and the Day He Played Two ContinentsThe drowning legend behind 'In the Air Tonight' (and why it's false), the time Phil Collins outran the clock on Concorde to play Live Aid twice in one day, and how a drummer became an accidental superstar.
- What Makes a Jazz Performance Video Work When There's No 'Video' to MakeJazz rarely gets the conceptual music video treatment, and that turns out to be its strength. On the quiet art of simply pointing a camera at musicians who are listening to each other.
- Bee Gees Facts: How 'Stayin' Alive' Became a Literal LifesaverDoctors use 'Stayin' Alive' to time CPR, the Bee Gees secretly wrote half your parents' favourite songs, and that falsetto was a happy accident. The disco legends, explained.
- The Unmistakable Look of 80s Synth-Pop, and Why It's BackNeon, fog, and a future that never quite arrived. Why the visual world of 80s synth-pop proved impossible to kill, and keeps getting resurrected.
- How the 90s R&B Video Defined an Entire Visual EraGlossy, intimate, impossibly cool: the R&B videos of the 1990s built a visual language so complete that we're still borrowing from it. A look at why they still feel definitive.
- Warehouse to Streaming: The Dance Music VideoDance music started in rooms never meant to be filmed. How its visual language evolved from no visuals at all to a genre that reshaped the music video.
- Acoustic on Camera: Why the Simplest Music Videos Are Often the BestNo CGI, no choreography, no budget: just a person, an instrument, and a camera that knows when to hold still. A case for the quiet power of the acoustic music video.
- The AI Music Debacle: Lawsuits, Deepfakes, and the Fight Over Who Owns a VoiceAI music turned into a full-blown industry crisis in 2025: fake bands fooling Spotify, streaming flooded with AI tracks, a Copyright Office bombshell, and lawsuits that could decide who owns the sound of music.
- How AI-Generated Music Got Here: The Milestones That Changed EverythingA plain-English timeline of AI music: from the fake Drake song that broke the internet in 2023 to the lawsuits, the first criminal fraud case, and the copyright fights that followed.