The Importance of Music Videos

Back in 1957, Elvis Presley starred in the film 'Jailhouse Rock', the film featured a scene in which Presley and a group of prisoners sing and dance to the Presley song of the same name; little did they know at the time that this scene was the starting point of a new form of media called music videos. Since 1957, music videos have evolved and become their own stand alone pieces of entertainment that have expanded the impact of the music industry for artists and fans alike. The concept of a music video is simple: it's a short film/video that is specifically created to be played with a piece of music, the images in the video are made to match the artists, music, and/or lyrics in either a commercial or artistic manner in order to generate public interest and popularity for the song;  when music videos originally started in the late 50s through the early 70s, this was the only reason music videos existed, however in modern times music videos have progressed into becoming flashy marketing devices that provide an entertaining display of memorable vocal and visual talent, a way of building a unique style and appeal for a music artist, a ploy to expand the fan base for an artist and/or song genre, and (most importantly) an advertising campaign to encourage viewers to purchase the song and/or other songs by that artist.

One important factor of the popularity of music videos is the way their distribution has changed over the years, back in the 60s the only way to watch music videos was if they were on at the cinema, technically these weren't music videos as we know them today as they would be scenes in films such as the 'Jailhouse Rock' scene above, these films were made to endorse the artist(s) and help further the sales of the albums that contained songs from the film; The Beatles did this multiple times with their films 'A Hard Day's Night' made to promote the album of the same name, 'Help!' which was made to promote the albums 'Beatles for Sale' and the film's soundtrack 'Help!', and 'Yellow Submarine' which prompted a mixture of past Beetles songs as well as 5 new tracks that were sold on the film's soundtrack; these cinematic marvels were all highly commercially successful by bringing in huge profits as films and by increasing sales of the albums they promoted, this lead to other record companies making music videos for their artists which eventually lead to television. Music videos were first shown on TV through specialist music variety programs such as 'Night Train', 'Don Kirshner's Rock Concert', and 'Top of the Pops', these are programs that show a selection of live musical performances and music videos to generate popularity for artists and songs to increase sales of their work; although these programs were good, music videos on television didn't really become popular until August 1st of 1981 when the words "Ladies and Gentlemen, rock and roll!" were spoken and MTV (or Music Television) was launched, the channel focused entirely on promoting artists by only showing music videos and music related news with 'Video Killed the Radio Star' by The Buggles being the first one ever to be shown, MTV has helped audiences connect with music on a whole new level, as well as helping increase the fame of music artists such as Michael Jackson in 1983 when his 'Billie Jean' music video was the first black music video to be shown on the channel.

In modern times, music videos have become widely distributed and shared via the internet, it became more convenient and less time consuming for audiences to simply go online and search for the exact video they want to watch at a moment's notice then watch it straight away, as appose to turning on their TV and waiting for the video they want to see to come on; some websites such as 'Last.fm' and 'Vevo' specialise in providing music videos to their users as well as music related news articles and tour information on artists, though other websites such as 'Vimeo' and 'YouTube' allow anyone to upload pretty much any type of video there is including music videos. One of the biggest advantages to music videos being on the internet is that the online audience is 37.3% of the global population, meaning a music video can be seen by tonnes of people from around the world and become famous almost overnight; a prime example of this would be 'Gangnam Style' by Kpop artist Psy, despite the song's lyrics being almost completely Korean, people countries that couldn't understand the language fell in love with the song for its music video due to its strange sense of humour and the unique 'horse-riding dance' invented and performed by Psy in the video, the video became widely shared and talked about amongst the internet and watched so frequently that at one point the video was getting an average on over 9,000,000 views per day for 2 months straight following its release on 'YouTube', at the time of writing the song has 2,019,273,937 views on 'YouTube' and is the most viewed video on the website. Unfortunately this is also the biggest problem with music videos being online, as with anyone allowed to upload anything there is no quality control, meaning a massive amount of poorly made music videos done to horrible songs being uploaded on the internet, when audiences view these videos they laugh at how horribly bad they are and share them with all their friends who laugh at the video then share it with all their friends and so on and so forth until the video goes viral; because of the large amount of fame and attention these bad music videos receive it prompts more people to make them, one of the most notorious being 'Friday' by Rebecca Black, with a music video that looks like it was made by someone who doesn't know anything about film and a song with such dull lyrics being droned by a dull, horrifically auto-tuned voice, this music video is bad, but it has been shared around by others wanting to show their friends just how bad it is, that it has amassed 68,796,044 views at the time of writing and is still hated by many to this day.

Music videos have been used over the years to help portray artists as unique individuals or as part of a group of individual artists, in both cases this is done in order to increase the public appeal and popularity of the artists; if an artist is new on the scene then the music videos for their songs will depict their on-screen character to be like other on-screen characters from the music videos of the same style of music, for instance if a the new artist was a man and his style of music was rap, the music videos for his songs would feature him wearing lots of "bling" and baggy clothes while being surrounded by sexy women, popular male rap artists like Lil Wayne and Chris Brown have made this style of music video popular amongst rap fans so they'd be more likely to view another music video by another artist with the same style; artists who have become popular in the industry for their personality as well as their music are the ones who are given more uniquely tailored music videos to their style of music and their personality as record companies know that fans of the artists will enjoy it, these unique music videos will stand out from the rest and draw attention from the public which will boost popularity for the artists and their work which will translate into more songs being produced with more unique music videos being made to accompany them. One artist who was able to elevate himself up from the generic music video grouping to getting his own unique style is Marilyn Manson, Manson's first two music videos are the sort of thing you'd expect out of a generic heavy metal video with shots of the band playing edited into a story about taboo subjects, however his third and fourth music videos were more tailored towards Manson's interests as he had became established about popular by this point, with 'Dope Hat' being a pastiche of Manson's favourite movie 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' and 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)' having Manson pushing the boundaries of how much controversy he could swell up by crossing and rolling around in the mud; to quote Manson: “I view my job as being someone who is supposed to piss people off. I don’t want to be just one-of-the-guys. I don’t want to be just a smiling face you see on television presenting some vapid kind of easily-digestible garbage.”, Manson's goal was definitely achieved when his 5th music video 'The Beautiful People' was released, audiences were both offended and disgusted by the grotesque imagery and references to Nazi Germany, the controversial display of the video set the standard for Manson's future music videos and told the world that Manson is the ultimate non-conformist, forever embedding him into music history.

Sometimes artists are unable to do live performances of their music, this could be for a number of reasons, such as using a song requiring the same one person singing multiple different lyrics at once that re-creating the original sound is physically impossible, the amount of unique instruments and additional singers needed to perform the song is too much for everything to be practically set up on a stage, or a song with lyrics complex and long winded that it's impossible to sing without becoming tongue-tied and/or physically exhausted in the process. The song which is considered by many to be the best song ever written: 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by Queen suffers from all of these problems and more, Queen were originally set to perform the song live on 'Top of the Pops' in 1975, at rehearsal sessions the band just couldn't achieve even a slightly appropriate quality performance that the 6 minute long ballad demanded, as such they decided instead to create a music video for the song so as to retain the brilliant original quality music and make it be shown on the 'Top of the Pops'; the entire video was filmed and edited to completion in just 9 hours as it was set to be broadcasted in the same week, so all of the special effects and were created while filming instead of the post-production phase, despite this the video and song became a massive success, this caused the song to become number 1 in the music charts for 9 weeks straight, with the impact of the music video on 'Top of the Pops' being what made it happen.