Music Videos Today

Over the years, music videos have changed dramatically. As stated before, music videos used to be for promotional purposes in order to convey the particular song to a wider audience. As technology has improved and more ideas have come about, music videos have also improved. Music videos before hand use to be more performance style videos such as Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street. (shown below)



This is just one music video of thousands that are available for anyone to watch with just a quick search on the internet, however it appears that as time as progressed, the style of music videos has changed. More and more videos are that of a narrative. This means that the video is more of a mini film, usually related to the song title or a particular line within the song. An example of a narrative video is one of the best (from my view and also channel 4's greatest music videos) music video's of all time; Coldplay, The Scientist. It was named the 11th Best Music Video of all time by Channel 4 in 2010.



In this video, lead singer Chris Martin is seen singing the song, however he is moving backwards. The whole video had to be filmed with him and everyone else walking and doing everything normally, and Martin had to lip-sync the song in reverse (which took him a month to learn). The video was then rewound and it appears that Martin is in fact walking backwards but singing the song perfectly. This idea was used as one of the lines in the song is 'I'm going back to the start'. The concept of the rewound video was previously used for Spike Jonze's 1996 music video for The Pharcyde's "Drop"

Music videos today now seem to 'copy' each other as directors take ideas from other productions and use them to create their own. A simple example of this is OK Go's - Here We Go Again shown below.



This same idea was taken and used in a recent television advert for Berocca.