Point 1. Obviously, the production of a music video is expensive. $500,000 easy. Point 2. Everyone is making videos these days. My grandma has a YouTube account.It's easy to understand why everyone from Velvet Revolver to Modest Mouse are hosting these make-our-video (at no cost to us) contests. But they've always turned out as slideshows and/or really bad short films. Until now.Adam Duritz posted on his blog the other day that all visitors to the site will now have the ability "to get raw footage of the band recording and playing the songs live" for another one of these contests. Pretty cool idea.The first round of home-recordings:"We're going to try and give you different stuff every week or two for a while or until we run out of things we're actually "allowed" to give you but it all starts right here with 4 different feeds of studio footage from "1492". Here's what you get: 1) Me 2) Immy tearing his guitar to shreds 3) Immy (he was pretty annoyingly everywhere on this song) pummeling his bass into pulp 4) Jim beating the living crap out of his drum kit. You can get your supplies to get started "here":http://www.countingcrows.com/news/journal.php?uid=2484.