After Eve took home the top honor at the first-ever AI Music Video Awards, presented by Sound & Screen, the weekly AI music video showcase hosted by Samori Coles. The act’s “Hollow” was named Best AI Music Video, and a second entry, “Blah Blah Blah,” won Best Technical Achievement. After Eve was the only creator to win more than one award.
The remaining categories went to six different creators. Ravyn Mae won Best Storytelling for “Daddy Don’t,” Dream Relic took Best Visual Style for “Time is a Limited Allowance,” Waking Up Christopher won Best Animation for “Take My Heart,” and Rayneedaye earned Best Social Commentary for “Greenwood Stories.” Fraize’s “Hand on the Wheel” won Viewers’ Choice.
Entries were scored by four judges: Drake Murphy, Chris Wieduwilt, Olivia B Moore, and Bruce Chamoff. Each judge rated every video from 1 to 10 on six criteria, for 24 ballots and 160 possible points per video.
The judging rubric reads like a list of the ways AI music videos most often fall short.
Story asks whether a video carries a crafted idea or is simply a run of attractive shots. Vision rewards going past the obvious treatment of a song. Cinematography holds framing, lighting, camera movement, and editing to an industry standard within the video’s own style. Character and world consistency asks whether the same face, wardrobe, and setting hold from the first frame to the last, and technical execution penalizes artifacts, morphing, and transitions that fall apart. The sixth criterion, song service, asks whether the video makes the track hit harder than it does on its own.
That last measure keeps the music at the center of a format that can easily drift into a showcase for image models. As AI video tools improve, the bar is moving from whether a clip looks impressive to whether it holds together and serves the song.
The awards grew out of Sound & Screen, which streams every Wednesday at 7 p.m. Eastern / 4 p.m. Pacific on TikTok at @samoricoles, with creators submitting videos live during the show. Coles, a Grammy voter and 30-year music industry veteran, has spent recent years building community among AI music and video creators, a story Zinstrel recently covered in its Culture profile of Coles. The show is connected to his AI Creator Society on Skool.