Industrial Context and Purpose of Music Videos

Purpose Of Music Videos

An artist creating a music video to go along with their music helps to boost the artist’s visibility and exposure. From a marketing perspective they are used to promote and increase the sales of an artist’s work. Due to most videos telling a story it engages the audience and draws their attention which in turn makes them more likely to purchase. In addition to this there have been some examples in which a song has become popular due to its video, if it contains cameos from big name celebrities, if it creates a trend or a famous dance. It can also allow the artist to create a more personal feel to their message, opens up the opportunity to connect to the audience on a more emotional level. Furthermore it allows the music to come alive in a visual way and artists can express their own creativity. 

The first ever music video as we know it today was Tony Bennett’s “Stranger in Paradise” made in 1953. Although just being created as small promotional films designed to highlight the new talking pictures, they do follow the typical form of a music video, they are formed around the performance of a single song.  
Between 1960-1970 music videos were often just promotional videos it wasn’t until the mid 70s that music television came to fruition eventually leading to the creation of MTV. 
MTV is an American cable channel that debuted just after midnight on August 1, 1981, with the first ever broadcast on the channel being a broadcast of “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. It followed the format of top 40 radio and presenters would talk about the music videos in between clips, but the channel struggled in its first few years. 

Shortly after one of the most iconic music videos ever was created in 1983 when Michael Jackson released ‘Thriller’, which quickly became extremely popular and is now a pop culture classic, despite being very out of character for Jackson at the time. This sparked the flames of the music video trend and almost all artists began to make videos and express their creativity.

This was when music videos went mainstream, people wanted to see a music video from their favourite artists and they almost became a necessity. 

Between 1992-2004 was known as the ‘rise of the directors’ and the quality of videos grew and grew 

This is also due to the improvement and development of technology, the development of video quality was rapidly increasing and in turn so were the music videos.  

Also things such as CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) brought a whole new possibility to music videos, allowing creative expression to be on a more abstract and unrealistic level. 

Recently the creation of Youtube has increased the availability of music videos to sky rocket, people from all around the world were now able to access their favourite artist’s music videos. 

Now a music video is almost necessary with any big artist’s new song release and in some cases are more looked forward to than the song itself.                                                                      

According to Music & Copyright, the three largest record labels - Universal Music Group (32% market share), Sony Music Entertainment (20%), and Warner Music Group (16%) - hold a 68% share of the music recording market.

The Majority of music videos are accessed on Youtube, and they are actually the most popular type of video on the site.

With the videos being on Youtube, they are able to be monetized and then can make money through adverts playing before the music video. Some videos also advertise merchandise at the end which helps them make money.