Why are music videos so important?
Music videos have become a big part of selling a song; even The Beatles in 1965 started releasing music videos for songs such as Help! which were successes. Music videos became a way to see your favorite artists without having to turn up to a concert.
Music videos have become a big part of selling a song; even The Beatles in 1965 started releasing music videos for songs such as Help! which were successes. Music videos became a way to see your favorite artists without having to turn up to a concert.
In
1981, MTV became the first designated music channel that showed music videos all day.
This, coupled with the appeal of videos from hugely popular and influential artists like Duran Duran and
Madonna, meant music videos became a main source of consumer access to music. The video to a song also helps the artist and their marketing team to produce the desired image of themselves and the song towards the audience, seen in a variety of conventions (more on those later in the blog).
Modern
music
videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to
promote the sale of music. This can be seen through the use of a lot of close and mid-zoom shots of the artist to help the viewer recognise them. Videos can be purchased on many music providers such as iTunes and Google Play, allowing viewers to watch their favorite artists all the time in return for a a fairly pricey fee.
With
the rise of sites like YouTube and Facebook, many music videos are seen first
and earn greater popularity online than anywhere else. For example, there are 28 music videos with over one billion views on YouTube, some of these gaining credit off the back of the music video alone.
As the purpose of music videos has changed over the years, the cost of filming a music video has increased from just a film of the band playing to miniature films and narratives. As you can see from the table below, artists such as Madonna dominate the most expensive videos ever, probably due to the glamorous image she has had over the years.
Source: Wikipedia
Types of Music Video
The next aspect of music videos I explored was the types of music video that can be made;
Performance Based, Narrative Based and Concept Based.
Intertextuality
Intertextuality is, put simply, the relationship between a variety of texts or other media. This is used to create an effect on the reader or viewer and provide a broader experience in a piece of text or video, and add layers of depth. Intertextuality occurs in almost any type of media, from similarities in films such as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter (an ageing wizard mentor in Gandalf/Dumbledore, and an inexperienced group of friends as the protagonists) or across different media.
For example, in Iggy Azalea's video for her song 'Fancy', she pays homage to the 90's film 'Clueless', as seen below. As well as the mise-en-scene, other aspects such as the opening to the video are extremely similar. I like what Iggy Azalea has done with intertextuality, and I think it creates a really nice effect if the audience notices the connection to Clueless as well as being a good video in its own right.
top: Fancy, bottom: Clueless
No comments:
Post a Comment