What is a Music Video? by James

A music video is a promotional material used by a band to increase the play count of their songs aswell as to try and reach a wider audience. This is created by shooting a video to accompany the tune/song in which the artist is allowed to portray what they believe the song and their lyrics mean. This allows for little interpretation by the viewer as to what the lyrics mean

There are 3 main types of music video. To begin with there is the general story style video in which the artist is not seen alot singing along to the lyrics but instead they employ actors to play out different scenarios through the song that relate to the lyrics. This means the audience could possibly connect to the actors in the video. Daniel Powter was renowned to do this by playing entire short stories through his videos in which invariably there is a happy ending. This implies that people could live the same life as the actors if they made the same decisions.

The 2nd type of video is at completely live set in which there is no story but instead the artist tries to involve the fans watching the video as to almost make them feel like they are there. This worked extremely effectivly in their 'hearts burst into fire' in which the video almost follows the band on tour, following just the good moments making their target audience feel that they could also maybe one day acheive this.

The final type of video is that of partial story and partial artist inclusion. These are generally done by the more 'main stream bands' who are trying to appeal to a wider range of people. They feel if they do this then different ranges of audiences can relate to different areas of the video. A good example of this is Lostprophets- Last train home video in which there are continual cuts from the fact that of following the band on the back of a lorry to the story line of the girl and boy mid break up. This appealed to such a mass audience that it helped propel them into the public eye and onto becoming an extremely sucessful band