The Purpose of a Music Video

The main purpose of a Music video is to promote the music/single/album of an artist, but also to advertise the music to an audience.

Music videos were first made as a marketing device to promote the sale of music recordings.

The first music video that was ever released was by "The Beatles" and was called "A Hard Day's Night" which was released in 1964. More modern music video's use a wide range of styles of film making techniques, such as animation, documentaries, short films and non-narrative approaches.

A decent music video must entertain and appeal to the mainstream audience . Some music video's also use narrative to tell a story but some music video's do not link the narrative to the lyrics, some contradict them and some don't use any narrative at all.

There are also many different genre's of video's that have different generic conventions that make them a specific genre.

For example, the Rock genre tend to use live performance in their video's:

 

  System Of A Down - B.Y.O.B 

 

The pop genre tend to have dancers of women in scantily clad clothing:

 

David Guetta - Where them Girls at
 

Rap tends to have bling, gang signs and also includes women dressed in scantily clad
clothing:

 

Tinie Tempah -  Drinking from the Bottle