The purposes of music video

Music video is generally used to accompany a song and is the producers way of illustrating that particular song. It can be used to help promote a song by using things such as sex appeal and using other celebrities. It can also be used to tell a story based on the lyrics just to keep the viewers attention. A lot of money can be made on music videos by using product placement, placing a product such as Coca Cola in the video to promote it and receiving money from Coca Cola to do so. Music videos have become more popular over the last 20 years and have evolved from just videos of the band playing a show into more detailed videos and the styles have developed.

The general purpose of a music video though is to illustrate the song as stated and often the video does relate to the lyrics, they can be done in different styles though in which the video doesn't relate to the song in any way. They can also help improve an artists popularity in other countries, because a music video on YouTube can be seen worldwide, it could be seen by someone in China and perhaps increase that artists popularity over there. Music video's are seen on music channels, something which has become bigger recently, MTV was the beginning of music video's on TV but has expanded to and music channels such as Kerrang, The Hits, 4Music, The Box and many more have spawned since, it all helps the cause of promoting the music and the artist.

Music videos can also be used to promote a film or possibly a TV series, mainly films. Sometimes a song is released by an artist because it is part of the film soundtrack and is used with the sole purpose of promoting the film, using clips of the film within the video to act as a trailer for the film and encourage people to watch the film. An example of this is "New Divide" by Linkin Park which is part of the Transformers soundtrack and has been used to promote it



Modern music videos often use something to make them memorable, there have been a lot of music videos in the past that people always remember and it helps make the song more memorable. An example of this is the video to "Gangnam Style" which has been incredible popular on YouTube due to the nature of the video and has really helped promote the song.