Music Video Genre & History

A music video is a short film clip used to accompany music with visual media. Using a music video is beneficial to artists in many ways. It can act as a promotion or advertising tool which can help raise sales of the actual song itself, it can also allow an artist to help communicate the message or artistic expression of their song through other means to the listener which may have been harder to achieve through just the original tune or lyrics.

Below is a typical modern music video called Roar by Katy Perry:

Music videos first became popular and regularly associated as a typical production process of releasing a new song in the 1980's. This was due to the rise of music being played on TV for entertainment, A popular channel still today is MTV and back in the 1980's they decided it would be a good idea to accompany the song with a film clip that would keep listeners interested and keep them on their channel instead of reverting back to radio. From there the music video was officially introduced as mainstream tradition with a new song.

The first recognised music video was actually not introduced on MTV. It was in fact a famous song by Elvis Presley called Jailhouse Rock. Due to this song being released in 1957 there was no real need for a music video as there were few televisions owned by households. Therefor this video all though popular now was considered a pointless exercise back in the 1950's. It was only until televisions became readily available to most households that music videos became so popular.

Genres of Music videos are hugely diversed since the mainstream use of them in the 1980's. Now every genre of music can use a music video to there advantage. This includes:

• Pop
• Rock
• RnB
• Dance
• Electronic/House Music
• Country
• Indie
• K-pop (Korean/Asian Pop)
• Rap etc.

In terms of the actual style of music video used by the artist in their specific music genre it varies hugely and does not always relate with the music genre, lyric or even message of the song all though typically it does so that listeners can use the video to help them understand the songs meaning. The styles vary greatly and use unique and different filming techniques and content. The content can be anything from a dramatic story relating to the song, documentaries, animation or even just live versions of the artist performing that particular song.