What is a Music Video?

A music video is a short clip with a mixture of a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings. Music videos use a wide range of styles of film making techniques including animation and live action. The music video is composed by adding images to music.

The music video director creates moving pictures for an already existing tune. A music video lacking a coherent narrative based on visuals and lyrics uses unifying aspects which are a distinctive trait of music. Images are bound together by the beat and other musical features. Sometimes the musical elements shape of the moving pictures. Movements like footsteps are often synchronized with the beat, so that people in the music video seem to walk in synch to the music. Melodic phrases can also be visualized by tilting the camera verticality to match the musical phrases up and down travel on the scales.

In many music videos a new meaning is added to the banal lyrics through metaphorical language, often with an amusing twist. When presented well, the concurrence of lyrics and text opens a dimension that an create a poetic experience. The greater the leap between the content of the lyrics and the imagery in this metaphorical joining, the more difficult it becomes for viewers to understand and interpret the context. The opposite of the metaphorical joining of lyrics and images occurs when the illustration to the lyrics are simply illustrated by the visual imagery. For instance, if a dog is mentioned in the lyrics, we see a dog on the TV-screen, if a child is mentioned, we are shown a child. Like a salad of images where the visual story is missing, the story is carried by the music and lyrics and not by an independent visual story.

To begin the analysis of the image the basic ideas behind the footage must be discerned in order to identify the key concept behind the video. By manipulating colour, motive setting, story footage, clothing and so forth, the music video director creates a couple of ideas which are repeated and varied. The concept is to rearrange visual motifs so that the work forms a whole.

There seems to be different layers of perception when a human being is audio-viewing a music video. Interacting layers of perception may be instinctive, inter-subjective and individual, which in turn activate social aspects such as family, peer group, region, country, language etc. When these different layers interact with unique personal memories and instinctive behaviour the analysis of music video becomes complicated. Situation variables occur frequently and they are often the content. In my experience many young people are unable to view a music video if they dislike the artist or the music. To give a simplified explanation, music video pictures can be an interpreted as a merging of three traditions of moving images: singing performance, visual story-telling, and the non-narration of modern art. 

But what people usually always forget is that the main reason for music videos are to entertain.