By Sedera Ranaivoarinosy

The release of Lady Gaga’s video for Telephone, her second collaboration with R&B golden girl Beyoncé, was an event like we rarely see anymore: the video is more than 9 minutes long, and the next day, everyone seemed to be talking about how cool it was that she used Coke cans as rollers for her hair and that her sunglasses had burning cigarettes over them.

Not too long after that, Lady Gaga’s music video collection reached a billion views, thus crowning her the current queen of the mainstream pop industry and the only performer today whose visual world holds as much weight as her music.

All this branding of Lady Gaga as the only artist able to “revive” the music video is not exactly accurate. Music videos were never dead. In fact, they’re doing quite well. But unsurprisingly, they find a better home on YouTube than they ever did on MTV.

In her piece for CNN Online, Who Killed the Video Star, Breeanna Hare says that “a blockbuster, big-budget video no longer means blockbuster record sales.” And she’s right. The excitement and anxiety for the release of the Telephone video came because the EP, The Fame Monster, from which it was taken had already done well in the charts, not the other way around.

But as she wonders where the video star has gone, she forgets that in our world of internet addiction and viral videos, Indie artists are the ones making the most of the medium and becoming the new video stars.

In 2005, OK Go took the world by storm when they released their homemade jewel “Here it goes again” on YouTube, delighting viewers of cyberspace with their quirky treadmill choreography. The video was so successful that they performed it live during that year’s MTV Video Music Awards (and only messed up once).

This year they struck again with the video for “This Too Shall Pass”, which reached 6 million views a mere six days after its release. This time, they presented a Rube Goldberg-inspired succession of tumbling dominos, rolling Lego cars and cascading water motion systems. Not only are they being inventive, they manage to do even better that which big budget videos did in the past: instead of just reaffirming an artist’s position in the industry, it imposes one for those who might not have gotten the attention otherwise.

And OK Go is just one example of musicians who have fun with music videos and turn them into a master tool for Internet buzz. The duo Pomplamoose got its push with its lo-fi video and fresh cover of “Single Ladies” by Beyoncé.

Even YouTube has noticed and launched a new channel, “Musicians wanted”, made specifically for those who rely on YouTube video views and shares on personal blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages or any other social networking sites. Through this addition, musicians who upload videos will be able to make money off the plays they receive, and keep it all for themselves instead of sharing it with the labels.

So maybe it seems like the video stars are dead because, instead of having an army of marketing people provided by their label behind them, they really just have themselves. And the product that we get in the end has a lot more heart in it.