Purposes Of The Music Video

In recent years music videos have become more popular in the music industry with almost ever artist releasing a video for new songs that they release, so with music videos becoming more popular the format of the videos are quickly changing with new styles and techniques being brought in all the time. So i today i will be explain to you the reason behind music videos.

To start of with i will be explaining one of the main reasons behind music videos and that is promotion. Artists will record music videos to help promote their songs and gain more attention from the public so their music can be shown to a wider audience. Music videos can also gain a lot of positive and negative attention, which can both be a great thing for the artist who released it, for example when Robin Thicke released one of the videos (The clean version is featured below) for the song ‘Blurred Lines’ it was heavily criticised for featuring nude models and was taken down of YouTube, however the video returned back to YouTube not long after, but this time with an age limit. But even with the criticism of the video and lyrics of the song, it managed to become one of the biggest selling singles on that year.

Now of course everyone knows that making a music video can cost a lot of money and sometimes the videos might not even get a lot of views, so one of the ways artists save money on creating music videos is by using product placement, which means companies will pay the artist or managers money to place their product in the singers music video, which could get viewers who watch the music video to buy that certain products. For example in Cher Lloyds ‘Oath’ music video we easily see her sat in a class room wearing a pair of X Sony MDR-X10 Headphones.

 

 

Another way singers can save money and get their music videos more noticed is synergy, which means when a singer writes a song for a movie or TV show they can help promote their music and the film/ TV show by using clips from the film/ TV show in their music video which helps get both the singer and movie or TV show more noticed. For example Alexander Rybak wrote a song called ‘Into A Fantasy’ for the film How To Train Your Dragon 2 and in the music video for the song there are clips and products from the movie in the video.

When making a music video who do you make it for? The viewers of course, But what is a music video if it has no one to watch it? The key thing about making a music video is getting it noticed and now a days with the internet and TV it is easier for a video to get noticed, just by posting them on such popular websites as YouTube or Vevo (Which can also help the singers and managers make money if they are a YouTube partner and gain loads of views on their videos) and by doing that there is a greater chance of the video being seen by a larger amount of people. A great example for this is Rebecca Blacks ‘Friday’, which only got around 3000 views in the first month, however after the video was featured on a blog it received 11,000 more views and two days later it was up to around two million views. Another way singers promote their music video is by getting them played on TV channels, such as 4Music and MTV, which can also help promote music videos and help them become more popular.

By Jess Cambridge