Is The Music Video Dead?
By Jimmy G
Billie Eilish, Bad Guy music video via YouTube.*
No, it’s not. Thanks for reading.
However, if you are still reading, it would be safe to say that the music video has indeed changed quite a fair bit.
Prior to the 80s, music videos were mostly nothing more than promotional films, adverts if you will, for the song in question. It was Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975 that catalysed the mainstream popularity of the music video, seven years prior to the emergence of MTV. It was the 80s with the work of Bowie, The Buggles, Duran Duran, Madonna, Michael Jackson and A-ha (to name a few) that made the music video so iconic, showing how song and film can work together as a perfect artistic cocktail.
However, the era of people spending their evenings watching MTV is long-gone, the channel is more synonymous with more adolescent and traditional programming such as Teen Wolf and Teen Mom. Music videos would be the main way listeners would be able to hear their favourite songs in the 80s and 90s, but the shift to Spotify and Apple music has led people to declare that the music video is a dead, redundant concept.
The music video is very much alive and kicking. Just like how a large amount of quality TV is now not found on the terrestrial channels but rather on the streaming giants such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, the music video – now pretty much exclusively – lives on YouTube.
Ashley Dingess, The Social Media Manager at LA’s #1 Hip-Hop radio station, Power 106 claims “For me personally, the music video is NOT dead, it’s one of my favorite things an artist can release when it comes to their music. Look at the YouTube and Vevo views… it’s not dead… ONLINE that is. Is the art of waiting for a video to drop on TRL (Total Request Live) after school is out… absolutely. We live in a world where everyone gets things fast and want to consume it, throw it out and move on to the next thing super fast. It’s sad. I miss wanting to run home for a video premiere. That is long gone. But videos are what tell the story of the song, the artist and the movement. You get to see your favourite artist use their creativity on a whole new level. Music video is NOT dead, it’s just alive in a different world now”.
“Music video is NOT dead, it’s just alive in a different world now.”
MTV, for all of its nostalgia, was essentially a glorified advertising platform with the hope that the viewer would like the artist’s song and/or music video and then rush out to their local record shop and frantically buy their album. With MTV playing a select few music videos on a circuit, it made the channel something of a monopoly on the music video market, choosing what to show the huge number of people watching.
However, now we live in the Vevo world , specifically the Youtube Adsense world, where music videos in and of themselves make money for the artist with adverts being played prior to the video. As well as this, lyric videos are also highly profitable ventures, which for a viewer, can cut out any narrative flab at the beginning and end of the song. This isn't even taking vertical videos into account, which are meant to cater for users on mobile. Take a glance at Lewis Capaldi’s "Someone You Loved" vertical video which entirely consists of him lip-syncing in his bathroom, having 1.8 million views. There is an abundance of music video content on YouTube, from past and present.
But creativity is still thriving and flourishing in music videos, 2018’s ‘This is America’- the music video by Childish Gambino- became one of the most talked about entertainment events of that year, ingeniously commenting on the current situation of US society; the video being the primary reason that the song became so popular in the US discourse. Plus, love her or hate her, Taylor Swift’s music videos always have outstanding production values rivalling eight-digit-long blockbuster budgets and of course, who could forget the gargantuan impact of Lemonade by Beyonce, which pushed the music video to it's very limit by being a sixty-five-minute film on HBO.
Sources:
-https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-50663724
*Bad Guy has amassed over 14 million views on YouTube and came top 3 for most watched music video behind Stormzy’s Vossi Bop (no.1) and Sam Smith and Normani’s Dancing with a Stranger (no.2).
-https://fomoblog.com/2018/01/02/has-the-age-of-the-music-video-come-to-an-end/