The Purpose of Music Videos

Music videos now are everywhere in the world on TV or the internet, music videos started to become more and more popular around the 1980s with the most recognised one to start the genre off was the Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, with more and more music videos coming out from either big artist or small time independent ones after. The purpose of this essay is to explore the genre of music videos and the difference between main streams music videos compared to small time independent artists and the meaning behind the video or the artist in them.

Music videos are mostly a way in order to promote the artist or band that feature in them, the way they do that is by with having their band or name in the music video or a distinct icon in it. An example is a music video called “Oh Yeah – The Subways”,

A form of identification they use to promote themselves is, that they have their band’s name on the drum kit, as it will be shown a lot throughout the music video and is always central on the wide shots. Another way they use in order to identify themselves is by their colour scheme they use in their music videos, as it keep with the black, red and white theme, either the white or black taking becoming the primary colour in it.

Music videos aren’t just about promoting the band, but also the director behind them. An example is from director called Spike Jonze, who has directed music videos for artist like Arcade Fire, Kanye West and also the Music Video,  I will be discussing called “It’s Oh So Quiet – Bjork”. This music video showed off his creative side of his directing and allowed to create complex scenes filled with effects and choreography; this helps to show his out of the box thinking making his technique unique for his music videos.

When it comes to promoting different types artists, producers will vary time and resources given to either a big time artist or independent artists. The main difference is the budget between the two, if we were to compare Post Malone’s rockstar to Tyler the creator’s Yonkers, you can see a difference in the sets as rockstar has much more creative and elaborate sets and clothing and extras, whereas Yonkers, just as Tyler the creator on a stool with a cockroach and wearing his normal clothing on. Also the difference of distribution of the music videos will be different as rockstar will be put on different radio shows, Music TV shows and different websites like vimeo or YouTube with it either being on a dedicated channel like Vevo or a personal channel, whereas Yonkers goes on less popular things and most likely the artist’s own personal channel or website.

But not all artists rely on a producer to help, there are artist who self-produce themselves, an example is an artist called “Bugzy Malone”, he has made, budgeted and released his music videos, in order to get himself more known in the industry. The advantages and disadvantages of being self-produced especially when making music videos can be things like have no creative limit and being allowed to create what you want and also there would be no budget limit on it, but the disadvantage is that the budget is coming from your own pocket and any sort of copy right or legal issue will have to done by themselves and have to help from no one else, unlike people who are part of a label who will get help from them and like low budget artist, their music videos will most likely only end up on their personal channels or website.

Some artists only create music videos to be remembered for and also make a statement from it as well. For instance with “1-800-273-8255 – Logic”, which is very different from the artist usually music videos and makes the statement of the problem about suicide and the help that is there to help and he does this by even making the name of the song after a suicide helpline and depending on the artist, the music video could get good distribution, like Logic who got it on multiply different platform allowing more people to see his music video and more to be able to remember it.

One of the main reasons for music video to still exist is the income that they create, both for the artist’s and their label as well. Most of the time the main income for the artist is the money that comes from royalties, the royalties that the artist is paid is estimated based on the number of views it has on all of the media outlets it had been shared on and then it is paid the artist. But if the artist or band is non main steam then it can be difficult to get much of the way of royalties, because they wouldn’t be able to get on popular TV shows or trending on YouTube to the lack of the views they will get, compared to a main stream artist, but YouTube is one of the best places to get noticed due to large amount of viewers it has. Another way is the form of competition, as if your music video wins, then that will increase its publicity.

In the present there are tons of different media outlets that artist can use to increase their publicity. The increasing amount of media outlets is good, because it allows more places to be able to distribute an artist’s music video and therefore easier to be seen by people, but the more the media outlets the more other videos will flush out your video from getting viewed more. There are many different media outlets for this; this can be from ones of the internet like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, ITunes and Spotify. It can also be on Television with Music Channels like Kiss, MTV, Top 40s; it can even be through advertisements like billboard.

Another way that companies and artists make money for their product, which is music videos, is a way through something called “Synergy”, which was first pioneered by Walt Disney, which is when companies would pay Disney to be able to make products from their films, ultimately giving Disney free advertisement and being paid for it as well. This is the same for things like football teams and the companies that sponsor certain teams or product placement in films and television shows and also Music videos, as they also help with synergy with the props they use in their music videos, like cars, clothing or jewellery and also advertise other artist as well. The synergy in music videos benefits all parties involved, them being the artist, the label and the companies the product is from as they all making money from it, whether it be from the actual music video or the free advertisement that the music video created.

The main reason why I think music videos are popular is because music videos make it so that the audience don’t have to perceive the song in their own way and the music video helps them imagine the music better, allowing them to enjoy it more than just listening to song as when they are listening to the song, they will imagine the music video in their head. It also allow the artist to have more of wide audience range because the music video is on many different media outlets as it doesn’t limit it to just one type of audience and creates more publicity for them.