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.