By Jhynel Cowan

A music video is a short film or video that accompanies an inclusive portion of music/song. Contemporary music videos are principally made

and used as a [marketing] mechanism intended to advance the sale of music recordings. Although the origins of music videos go back much further, this

was then developed and became more popular within the 1980s, when MTV based their format around the medium, and later with the launch of VH1. The term "music video" first became well-

known and used in the early 1980s. Here is a YouTube link, to one of the first music video’s to be previewed on MTV:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSJ27TgBvJE

“The Buggles- Video Killed The Radio Star”

Music video performance consists of either the whole of the video or several parts of it including live, on-stage performance by the artist. A clear

example of this is a video by The big pink- Dominos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=OGnNlQ-KNv4, the video for this song uses on-stage performance continuing throughout.

A narrative in a music video is much like a mini-movie, Gwen Stefani uses narrative in many of her music videos, Gwen Stefani-

cool tells a story, as she meets her ex boyfriends current girlfriend:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGwZ7MNtBFU

Some video’s are very symbolic and have many meanings, both clear and hidden. Most songs that don’t make much sense usually have a symbolic

meaning, once looked into, the current artist “Lady Gaga” stars in her own music videos, almost all of

them are symbolic videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I -Bad

romance, the video for this song is a mix of deep symbolism containing randomness, artistic fashion

with corporate product placements and modern day corruption with religious imagery, all rolled up in a

great big music industry festivity.

Notion of looking is basically all about the audience viewing scenes of the music video of which the people in the video’s are looking upon something else which

also draws our attention to other then what’s going on in the scene, the main focus is on what the character is viewing, for example whether they're looking in the

mirror at something, or at the television screen at something that plays a big part to the video itself. A

good example of this is Madcon- Beggin’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h96Qo0tRBQ at the start of this video, the two are playing a video game which captures all our attention, which then draws out in order to view the scene as a whole.

The conventions of a music video vary depending on genre of music, the way things are done within the video this also describes

the genre of the music video. However, some general conventions include the artist is shown

performing, the lyrics of the song influence what is shown in the video, the pace of editing

fits the pace of the music, and the codes of dress reflect the mood of the song.