Purposes of Music Videos

For each and every band out there, there is a certain style of music video (pop promo) they choose to follow, eg, Paramore tend to follow performance based videos, and HelloGoodbye follow narrative based videos. However, each of these have to be based around the target audience that the band their producers wish to meet.
Examples of this can be found in all types of music genre videos such as Rap. Hip hop videos have the tendency to show large expensive houses, expensive cars and women dancing with lots of jewellery on, and rock videos have mainly performance based representations of their music, with some narrative that may or may not correspond to the lyrics. Music videos first came about in the mid 1960s, with bands such as The Beatles & The Rolling Stones creating short films which they used to promote thier records. This allowed people to hear their music, and in a sense see the band no matter what thier current location was all around the world without them having to be there to see them playing live. this in-turn them rasied the appeal and demand for thier tracks.However, the BBC placed strict limits as to how many could be shown, which encouraged artists to produce ones at a high standard so that the song's sales would increase due to viewers wanting to see it again the following week. It took a while for this idea to take off and into the early 1970’s more and more bands were making pop promos that were then beginning to be featured on shows such as Top Of The Pops. However, the BBC placed strict limits as to how many could be shown on thier channel, and with the BBC being the most watched and broadcasted channel at the time, artists began to produce music videos at a high standard so that they had more chance of being shown and so that song's sales would increase due to high demand from viewers wanting to see it again the following week. It took until the 1980’s for pop promos to become mainstream, with the launch of MTV in 1981, a station which aired pop promos non stop, music videos were available to anyone anywhere in the world, not only was this service free, it caused the sales of bands records and albums to rocket higher than they had ever been.
Initially however, it was mainly British acts that werecreating music videos to be sent to MTV to be broadcasted, which caused a 'Brit Invasion' into the US charts. This in-turn caused more american and canadian acts to follow up and create thier music videos to, and it wasn't long before pop promos became a world wide sensation. As many people know, the most popular pop promo known so far, seems to be ‘Thriller’ by Michael Jackson. Regularly dubbed as the best music video of our time, the 14 minute video created my Michael Jackson and John Landis would have been expected to reach it’s high expectations with a budget of $500,000 as it was it made turn overs of over 1 million dollars in a short amount of time, and resulted in over 110 million copies of the song being sold world wide.
Most bands will release 3 to 4 ‘singles’ which are tracks off the album, to give the listeners a preview of what they might be buying if they choose to buy the album. Pop Promos are ultimately used to help boost the sales of records and albums, most people prefer to see a music video to understand what the song is about, rather than just listen to it. However occasionally songs come out that sell four or five times the amount that the video is played on MTV or wathed on Youtube, such as Owl City's - Fireflies. If they are successful in creating a music video that caters to everyones taste, the songs and videos live on and are found being played on MTV, Kerrang!, Scuzz, and even iPods at all times of day, and thanks to the latest technology, they can be found on phones and download sites such as IsoHunt, Limewire and Spotify, and this doesn't just meant the track, you can download the video aswell to your computer, laptop or mobile phone.