The Purpose of The Music Video

Music Videos are something that we've all come to love over our lives.During this essay i am going to be discussing the purpose of music videos and why so many people love them. They weren't always the same as the ones we have today as they only first came around in 1941 when the Panoram Soundie came around. It was a new version of the classic jukebox that would play short clips along with the music.  By 1981 we had the original version of the TV channel MTV release that played music videos for 24 hours everyday. Now we have many different versions of this channel and other ways to stream music videos online for our own entertainment.

Promotion 

One of the main things we see music videos doing is promoting the artist. This can be done in a number of different ways. first of all it will usually be done by just having the band or the artist featured in the video. This helps promote the artist as the audience watching the video is only watching it for the artist then. One band that does this quite well is The Kooks with their music video for Junk of the Heart. This video promotes the band as it only features them within the video. A lot of different musicians use music videos to promote themselves or a new style that they are taking on and they want the audience to notice. But these videos can also be used to promote someone behind the scenes like the director. For instance one director that was promoted through music videos was Michel Gondry as he directed Fell in Love With a Girl and also done it for other artists such as Daft Punk and Radiohead.

Producers Strategies

Producers will use many different ways to publicize different bands or artists. Mainstream artists such as Calvin Harris will have lots of publicity and money behind them which will become evident in their music videos as they will be able to have glossy effects and loads of different forms of CGI to attract more people to their video. This is clearly evident in Calvin Harris's song My Way and its music video. You can tell its got these effects in the video when there is a man standing in the middle of loads of red screens. Also they use drones to get shots of landscape in the video so this is another factor that shows they have an extremely high budget for this video.

Whereas independant bands/ artists who are just starting out will usually have to use their own money and cannot afford to front a large scale production for the video so instead make one that they can afford which doesn't ever look as good as the mainstream videos that people produce with larger budgets. A band which i looked at for this was Fun, before they became very popular they had a few original songs released like their song Walking The Dog and the music video which was produced primarily by them.

Extending Artists & Record labels income

An extension of income happens when an artist releases their music on more than one platform, so if their music video is being shown on TV the artist is going to gain royalties which is money for each time the video is watched or the song is played. This is done by artists when they release their song on multiple platforms, so if they originally released the song on soundcloud and then have it come onto spotify and YouTube they are going to be making more money than they would have done if it was only on soundcloud. For this i chose 'Empire of the Sun's song We Are The People. The reason i chose this is because the song was released on multiple platforms, for instance it first released on soundcloud and then moved onto YouTube and spotify. After about 3 weeks they had their song playing on TV every few hours and on the radio in the charts every day. They then got an even larger amount of income as they got paid by EA (electronic arts) to have their song in the Fifa soundtrack and it was then released again in a soundtrack album for the game which made a considerable amount of income due to the player base of the game being so big and all the fans wanting to listen to this song more.

They even used this song to make a slogan for the game as they were showing trailers for Fifa 14 they used the songs name and mixed it to make the slogan "We are Fifa 14".

Synergistic Marketing-

Synergistic Marketing is where a song and music video has been made to go along with a certain film that has or is going to be released. Its not always just for films but primarily is done for them. Disney are one of the biggest studios that do synegistic Marketing for songs as they nearly always have their own songs in the films they release and then release a soundtrack for the film. For instance one example i have for them is Frozen, this film is one of Disney's biggest money makers and the soundtrack made a very big revenue from it. One of the songs in the film called 'Let it Go' made it to number one in the UK hot 40 for about three or four weeks in a row which made them a much bigger amount of profit than they ever expected it would have made.
The music video i have chosen for this part is "Sucker For Pain" This song was made in synergy for the 2016 movie Suicide Squad by Twenty One Pilots. this song released before the movie hit cinema screens, this got people even more excited for when the film was hitting the screens and also due to it being such a big film this song hit 19,000 downloads sold in the week ending Feb. 16