What is the Purpose of a Music Video

Promotion:
The purpose of a music video is to create a visual for the song to
further promote the artist and team behind the production. A music
video allows the song to be streamed on TV on channels that often
count down song charts like MTV. It also allows its to be put on
YouTube, to allow more publicity and money to be made from the
song due to the huge amount of viewers YouTube has.

Income:
A music video can also create a larger profit for the artist and
channels like MTV have to pay to use their videos on TV. YouTube
also allows artists to upload a music video and put an ad or two
before or after the video, giving the label an easy wat to market the
song to a huge audience while also making profit off the upload.

Artists can also use a series of music videos to promote an album by

creating a story that makes audiences want to continue watching, an
example of someone who has used this is Abel Tesfaye who goes by
the stage name ‘The Weeknd,’ in his album ‘Beauty Behind the
Madness’ (2015) he created a storyline where he was constantly
followed by an old man who he couldn’t stop running into, this man
represented the mainstream media and how no matter what he
can’t hide from it, it even makes multiple attempts to kill him, before
in the ‘Tell Your Friends’ music video he shoots this character killing
him, right after burying a body which turned out to be himself,
signifying he was killing his old self. Tesfaye has also used this in his
2020 album ‘After Hours’ to a much greater extent representing how
his like of hard partying, women and drugs has finally taken his toll
on him.
Synergy:
Music videos are often created as a synergy, meaning two things
work together to benefit from something, in this case a music video
to profit from. The Weeknd is another example of this when he
worked with ‘Fifty Shades of Grey to create the song ‘Earned It’ with
a music video highlighting the extremely sexual nature of the movie
and Abel’s other songs while also showcasing the emotion in it the
movie and Abel’s previous projects. The video highlights that the
movie has a sexual nature while the song talks about how Abel feels
about a woman and how she treats him much better than many
other women previously in his life saying she has ‘Earned It’ It
meaning his love. While this may not seem as being appealing to a
mainstream audience it helped promote the premise of the movie to
the audience that would find the movie appealing while also giving
The Weeknd a song to profit on, and as of the time of writing this the
music video has 578 million views on Youtube.

Extensions of Outlet:
Many record labels don’t allow albums to be uploaded to YouTube
due to how easy it can be pirated off 3rd party apps and programmes,
so many invest in a music video to give the music video the
availability on YouTube and Vimeo, but mean that the person will
have to deal with a much larger storage file and they may distort or
stop the song throughout it to fit the narrative being told In the
video making people listening to it without the video frustrated and
more likely to use a legitimate method of downloading it.