What Makes Today’s Music Video a Hit?
A funky, creative piece on YouTube, rather than a six-figure high-end video production with a Swedish director, is the mark of the contemporary music star.
Given the music industry’s crunch and the fact that Gen Yers are watching them on a laptop anyway – the music video, long an extravagant mega-budget production, is stripping down dramatically.
OK Go’s viral hit, where the band dances on treadmills, rode the helm of what makes today’s music video a hit.
Times have certainly changed as outlined in this story titled “Music videos go lo-fi as cash dries up”: :
When MTV’s award show kicked off 24 years ago, the network was ushering in a new era where the video was king: a branding tool and an art form rolled into one. Today, the channel broadcasts mostly reality shows while YouTube, iTunes, MTV.com and various other online destinations have become the dominant viewing platform for videos.
“The new aesthetic is that it’s very low-budget, lo-fi, very do-it-yourself, not at all dedicated to the old style of music video which was always bigger and louder and more explosions and more money,” says Saul Austerlitz, author of Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes.
“This is more a punk-rock esthetic,” he adds. “It’s very exciting.”
This post was written by: Kim Mickelsen