The Music Video Medium

A Music Video is the videotaped or animated performance to accompany the single edit of a song from the particular band’s album. They usually have one of these three employments:

Dance – Beyonce – Single Ladies

Live Footage – Red hot chilli Peppers - Snow

Fragmented story – Foo Fighters - Long Road To Ruin


The contempary music video is usually between three to five minutes longs and they are known to have quick cuts, connotated imagery and in some cases specific computer graphics.

They are used as promotional material to vehicle the promotion of CD singles, and over time music videos have became more cliché and are followed by specific rules called conventions and codes.

Conventions and codes are what give the text meaning and determine the response of the viewer these codes and conventions can come from three areas
Symbolic
Technical
Written and audio

The conventions of music videos are

The History of the Music Video
The music video we know today is very different to how it started the idea of music with video became a reality in the 1920’s with the arrival of sound films with the “Spooney Melodies” series, these short films were mainly footage of the performer singing the song with backgrounds and animations combined together.

From then on they kept incorporating music into films but it wasn’t until 1959 until the term “music video” appeared. Artists such as Elvis in order to get a worldwide audience would have films which starred him and have the songs in them.
The real revolution was due to the Beatles film “a hard day’s night”. The mock documentary had innovative musical sequences which made the basic templates which promo clips and music videos were modelled upon having a massive influence on not only the style but also the visual vocabulary to the genre.

In 1966 Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" Monochrome clip was featured in Pennebaker's Dylan film documentary this video has also been the basis for the vue-card device which has been imitated in many videos since.

The popularity of the music video form expanded when in 1981 The MTV cable network was established creating a large influence in 1980’s and in by the 90’s hundreds of videos where available.

In Modern day culture music videos are a part of everyday life with over 20 music channels in the UK and the use of the internet with web 2.0 and sites such as Youtube and vimeo allows people to hve easy access, comment, and even create music videos in order to promote themselves with equipment being easier to get hold of.
The target audience for music videos are teenagers although softer songs will be aimed at older audiences.

What Influences The Music Video Today?
Music videos today use a variety of postmodern ideas such as intertextual references from television film and popular culture and genre specifics.