What is a Music Video?

In today’s music industry the music video has become a unique selling point of a record. As the industry rapidly decreases in record sales Record companies need to discover what will boost sales rates. Due to Illegal music piracy based on the internet people are able to obtain music for free very easily, so why would they buy music?

With a target audience of teenagers/students music videos are a unique selling point as they are based around the internet, websites like ‘Youtube’ allow the videos to be exploited for free, although this is can damage the industry it is still a form of advertising for music. It is key to have an interesting and engaging video which will make people want to spread it around to their friends through social networking sites like ‘Myspace’ and ‘Facebook’.

Music videos can also be accessed on TV channels such as ‘MTV’ and ‘Kerrang’. TV channels are aimed at a specific audience and normally play only one genre of music. Channels like ‘Scuzz’ aim their music at heavy metal fans by playing constant heavy metal. On the other hand channels like MTV have more coverage as not only do they play a variety of genres they also show TV programs involving music starts and famous people on shows such as MTV Cribs which shows short clips from music videos.

As music videos have been available to buy on the internet and iTunes they have evolved into more of a ‘story’ opposed to showing the bands talents. A key way of showing this would be comparing a music video from the Beatles where they play live on a talk show, each standing in suits just playing music with not much happening. The video was purely about the music. In comparison to that Lady Gaga’s music videos all have distinctive effects and locations to make it memorable. The music video to her song ‘Telephone’ is almost like a short film just using the music as a soundtrack. It is almost 10 minutes long and features other music artists such as ‘Beyoncé’ which will gain a huge fan base.

Evaluation of AS blog

What went right?

Last year’s blog was a good success; the overall grade that our previous blog got was 94/100. This was an accomplishment for our entire group as it helped push our overall grades up to a higher mark band.

A positive of our blog from last year was the amount of work we done. This was done by working together as a team and discussing the amount we aimed to do and doing extra work whenever we could, for example, talking about other areas such as ‘the use of viral marketing’.

Another factor which went right for our blog was the visual imagery that we used. We tried to make it as visually appealing as possible because the mark band suggested that it would make us get into the higher mark band which we accomplished. Images that related to the work also helped us up the grade of blog. For example in this blog post we can see that the amount of images compared to text equal up to what we wanted to achieve. Also this blog shows pictures of the 4th day of filming, using pictures from the day out which we took using one of the group members phone.



The third thing that we achieved well was the different use of media. We used various methods of media, such as online resources and online videos, for example, video clips from YouTube. This showed our creativity and knowledge of the media that we were able to use. Also we used different technological products to help us accomplish tasks. This includes using smart phones to take pictures on the days of shooting and immediately upload them online.

What could have been improved?

When looking back on last year’s blog we can see that there could have been some slight improvements throughout the blog. One of the first improvements we could have made was to create more of a 'journey'. This would mean that the blog could have flowed more of as a whole, and established more of a timeline of how we created the final video and the steps we took to create it.



Another improvement we could have made was to spread out the amount each person posted in the group, for example, I may have only done around twenty blog posts whereas Brad may have done around twenty five. To overcome this problem this year, me and Brad have suggested that we will look at all the blog posts we will need to do this year and then spread it out so it is more of an equal number.

A thing which we would have to look at this time that we create a product and a blog is that this year we only have two people in our group, compared to last year when we had four. This can be a problem because it means between us we will have to do double the work so we will have to improve on our time keeping skills to keep the establishment of a journey.

Tom Winn