Codes and Conventions of Music Videos

                    Codes and Conventions of Music Videos

Music videos are commonplace among mainstream music nowadays, and have outright flooded the industry, no matter what genre you’re looking at, and there are things that pretty much all of them have in common, or that make them identifiable as a music video. These are their conventions. Conventions of music videos are basically aspects, features or creative choices that allow people to recognise it as a music video, Things that music videos have in common, or are expected to have in common. Modern music videos, generally, have two purposes: promote the artist, and get people interested in the song, simultaneously getting people interested in the artist. It’s all about artist promotion in the modern music industry, and this is done through either narrative or performance.

The performance aspect is what we see here,  the band/artist performing the song together, playing the instruments, singing in synch to the song,  that’s what a performance based music video is the artist performs. Of course if they were all to perform in the same way, music videos would get boring very quickly. So everyone tries to do something a little different to their predecessors. It’s not commonplace to get a video that’s purely performance in the rock genre nowadays, with the most recent one being Feel Invincible by Skillet. In the mainstream however, the majority of the videos are

The narrative aspect of music videos is exactly that, a music video with a narrative. It tells a story, like with this video for I Apologise by Five Finger Death Punch, we see the sorrowful wandering of a man through a graveyard of his icons and all the legends of rock, and Serpents by Neck Deep which shows us how this man is having a very hard time with his ex, likening her to some form of evil supernatural creature. (I assume). Ashes of Eden by Breaking Benjamin enlightens us with a tragic extra-terrestrial story about two alien beings lost to earth’s gravity, and Little White Lies by Deaf Havana gives us a proper 80s lads night out after a good game of footy. Music videos with a narrative can still have the artist(s) moving their lips in synch with the song, even if it doesn’t really fit with the diegesis or the video itself, such as in this video for Enemies by Shinedown. The plot is basically them in a band meeting trying to make progress, but they all end up beating the piss out of each other instead. And all throughout, they move their lips to the words, even though if often doesn’t make much sense. This is actually the case with most of the videos I just mentioned, as is practically a convention of music videos.

 But the most common type of music videos is ones that intersperse both narrative and performance. The ones that flick back and forth from telling a story, and showing how awesome the band are and how well they can play in an attempt to convince the viewer to support them. In fact, some of the aforementioned music videos are a mixture of narrative and performance based, such as in Serpents, we see the performance of the band with some unique animation to complement.

But ultimately, the primary purpose of any music video is to draw attention to the artist, and to promote their song. And if they can succeed in doing that by collating an interesting narrative, stellar performance or combination of both, then that’s a plus for them and their record label.