“The Buggles” said that the video killed the radio star in 1979. 2024’s version of this is that social media killed the video star. What happened to music videos?
In recent years, the release and success of music videos on Youtube has significantly declined. With a mixture of the loss of the original MTV, as well as the popularity of social media and short-form content, consumers have neglected the art form that is in music videos and artists have responded in correspondence.
TikTok and Instagram are full of content (and entirely oversaturated) in the music landscape, which varies from genre to genre, with pop music having lost its popularity since 2020. In 2021, K-Pop expanded its dominance over the music industry in the U.S., and in 2023 R&B/Hip-Hop topped the charts as the No.1 music genre. However, in 2010, pop music reigned supreme.
Even in the 1980s, synthwave and dance pop was becoming a huge stylistic branch and artists were exemplifying their creativity through music videos, which were growing in popularity due to the initiation of Music Television, a cable channel dedicated to music videos in 1981. For example, consider Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, which was an impeccable 14 minute concept video with over 1 billion views on Youtube.
Recently, album or song visualizers have taken the lead. Post Malone created a visualizer for his song “Mourning” instead of a video and Shaboozey did the same thing for his TikTok viral song “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”. 2020’s pop-princess Sabrina Carpenter, however, takes after her predecessors and published creative concept videos for some of her tracks from album “Short N’ Sweet”.
On the contrary, some pop artists have rejected the music video entirely. Chappell Roan, an icon in both the queer and pop music communities, expressed in an interview with Rolling Stone that she hasn’t had time to put forth enough creative thought in a video because she’s too exhausted to make a good one.
But all this has happened for a reason. Fans just don’t care about music videos as much as they used to. They see half the video or hear ¾ of the song on TikTok before it ever comes out, so why would they ever watch the whole video?
Just five years ago, Ariana Grande released the music video for her hit single “7 Rings” and she attracted over 23 million views in the first 24 hours of its release. This year, Sabrina Carpenter released the video for her song “Taste” with Jenna Ortega and she saw half of that, with only 12 million views within a day of its release.
Rock is dead, long live paper and scissors? No. Pop is dead, long live snap and crackle.
