Types of Music Videos

In many recent years, the development and creation of music videos in the music industry specifically has grown and changed in many ways. The reasons are because of new technology, abstract images and fresh ideas which have encouraged artist these days to expand how they represent themselves in their music videos and how they want to portray the lyrics. It is all succeeded through 4 main typologies being:

• Performance
• Conceptual
• Narrative  

Performance
A performance video focuses on showing footage of the artist or band either in a casual environment such as socialising with friends, or performing, whether that be live performance or staged performance.

Concept
Concept videos based around a single idea or concept and are usually unusual and obscure, even surreal for the audience. The unusual context is an attraction to many customers, which draws them in. A successful concept video will keep the audiences entertained and constantly looking at what or who is on the screen.

Narrative

A song with a narrative based music video the song includes a narrative story of the lyrics/words being acted out in some way. This style relies on imagery to produce a story for the audience to follow and some narrative videos include clips from films that the song has been featured in. This seems to be used a lot in slower songs, often love songs.

 

Animation & Mixture

Animated music videos can range from the images being hand drawn, created by computer graphics or moulded out of material such as plasticine. This style of music is very creative and makes it very visually entertaining to watch. A song with a 'mixture' music video consists of more than one of the above. The most common video types to combine are performance and narrative.