Research: What is a music video?

What is a music video?
A music video is a short piece of visual image that accompanies the song. This short clip tends to reflect the lyrics of the song in order to give a narrative and entertain the audience.

Purpose of the music video?

• To gain more publicity
• Entertain audience
• Promote the artist's new album
• Gain a profit
• Portray narrative for the song

Classic conventions:

• See the artist singing the song, being the 'star' of the video. For example in this music video, Rita Ora and Chris Brown are both performing the song, lip syncing and dancing to it, portraying the 'star' image. 
  

• Often a narrative, suggesting there is a story behind the song which is being portrayed.

• Background dancing, for example, in Chris Brown's music video for 'Yeah' there are background dancers in order to enhance the performance.
  
  

• Glamorised, e.g. if the song is from a 'hip hop' genre there may be iconography such as chains and cars to glamorise the idea of being famous and rich like 50 Cent does in the 'Candy Shop' music video.

• Special effects

Synergy:
When artist's release a music video it is often only one strand of their multi media campaign of their promotion. This is because the single's they are releasing are usually to promote the up coming album, using the music video to gain popularity. The music industry as a whole has a relationship with a number of different other medias and for different purposes for e.g. radio, tv, print media, film and the internet. For example, Chris Brown uses these different types of synergy in order to gain publicity.

Chris Brown on The Breakfast Club on the radio: 



Chris Brown on a TV interview:


Chris Brown on the cover of Prestige magazine:

Chris Brown starring in the film 'This Christmas': 


Chris Brown's social media, e.g. Twitter:

Audience impact:

The audience is impacted majorly by music videos as it:

• Influences opinions of the artist which could be positive or negative which may mean the audience will see the artist in a different perception.
• Creates an emotional connection between the audience and artist, they are able to understand the ideologies and opinions of the artist creating a connection.
• May change the interpretation of the song once the music video been released, suggesting that the audience may not understand why the artist has chose to interpret the song in a certain way. Every person has different interpretations which may cause controversy. 
• May also develop and understanding for the audience.

A music video...

Often contains a number of different elements:

• Performance: This means the music video is based on performance, where the artist is lip syncing the song or dancing to it. This could also mean having back ground dancers in the music video. For example, in the music video "Where have you been" by Rihanna, there are background dancers throughout performing the song. 
  

• Narrative: This means the music video is based on a narrative where there is a storyline shown throughout. For example, in the video "Smartphones" by Trey Songz, a narrative is shown of him cheating on his girlfriend which matches the lyrics of the song.
  

• Thematic: This means that the music video has common themes depending on the genre of song. For example, a Rap song would have images of streets and gangs mostly, whilst a pop song would tend to have dance routines. For example, Justin Bieber's song "Sorry" is in the Pop genre where the whole song is just performance as this is the common theme in most Pop songs.
  

• Symbolic: This means that the music video uses a lot of symbols to build up meaning. For example, a graveyard can suggest a death approaching. For example, in "Find your love" by Drake there is a death and the iconography of the gun suggests this. 
  

Technology advancements:

Current threats...

• People listen to music on the go on their phones and iPods using organisations such as iTunes and Spotify with no need to watch the music video.
• Impact between the artist and audience if artists start to charge to watch music videos on websites such as 'Tidal'. This may push the audience to refuse to watch any paid videos.
• Censorship is becoming much harder.
• Covers or remixes of songs which the audience may prefer giving less publicity to the original artist. 

Positives of music videos...

• Doesn't always cost much to make music videos.
• Technology has become better which will ensure music videos are created better.
• Loyal fans will still watch their favourite artist's music video regardless.

Overall, music videos are still majorly popular at the moment, however, some threats may be able to take over in the future. This means that the music video industry is not as popular as it once was. I believe that the audience is becoming less interested in music video's as the younger generation listen to music on the go rather than watching the video constantly. Personally, I will focus on a narrative based music video as this will be the easiest way to portray the lyrics as I want to build the relationship between the lyrics and visuals.