what is a music video?

A music video is a short film relating to the song its assigned to, there are many types of music videos for example narrative based, performance based, concept based, showcase and intertextual.
These terms will be looked through thoroughly within the next couple of posts including links of videos associated with the different types and directors who trademark that style.

There are a vast variety of music genres but there are only a few out the many artists that make music videos although these artists are usually mainstream. Music videos in the mainstream are usually made for marketing purposes of the label and the artists, these videos usually contain lots of women acting as sexual objects to attract male audiences and vice versa for female audiences.

The main purposes of a music video are as follows

• to sell the song and invoke a reaction in the audiences so that they remember the song,
• to give the listeners a better understanding of the song,
• to show off other talents that the artist/musician may have e.g Chris Brown and Justin Bieber dance in their videos,
• to increase sales by creating a memorable visual for the song,
• to market for exposure + expansion of an artists profile and finally
• as a promotional tool for artists and label

Music videos started to become famous in the 1980s when MTV started to base themselves around the music videos and so did VH1 later on, MTV's first music video was 'video killed the radio star' by The Buggles which can be seen by viewing the link just below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8r-tXRLazs