Music Video

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Music video emerged as the object of academic writing shortly after the introduction in the United States of MTV (Music Television) in 1981. From the beginning, music video was claimed as the focus of academic study by different disciplines or subfields, leading to evident tensions and territorial disputes in early scholarship. For television scholars in the 1980s, music television networks (such as MTV) were seen to confirm the sense that television, with its fragmentary forms and repetitive structures, was the quintessentially postmodern medium. Scholars of popular music, less drawn to claims about music video’s postmodern character, were more concerned with the fate of music within a cultural form that bound it to moving images. This emphasis on image, some argued, threatened the autonomy of music and facilitated its commodification and co-optation. As academic writing on music video developed in the 1980s and 1990s, it followed a range of directions corresponding to different disciplines and specializations. Scholars of media economics and institutions studied the ways in which music video production had come to be integrated within the functioning of the music industries. At the same time, and amid widespread public outcry over the sexual and violent content of music video, numerous studies examined the treatment of women or racial minorities within music videos. Some of this work was interpretive or qualitative in character, drawing on the increasingly popular methodologies and political impulses of cultural studies, which spread across the humanities during this period. Other academic studies of music video content were quantitative, involving content analyses of selected samples of music videos or statistical measurements of the responses of viewers to particular kinds of content in controlled situations. As the novelty of music videos declined in the late 1990s and their distribution came to favor the Internet more than specialty television networks, the popularity of music video as a distinct object of study likewise seemed diminished. This decline in the influence or novelty of music video networks was hastened as well by the move of networks such as MTV toward “long-form” programming (such as reality programs or documentary series), which reduced the time devoted to video clips. Within scholarship on music video, the most notable trend since 2000 has been to situate music videos within broader contexts involving the audiovisual treatment of music and the changing nature of music video in the digital era. A range of works have placed music videos within a broader history of encounters between music and audiovisual entertainment media such as cinema or television. Among the most important of these studies have been those that study the audiovisual media systems outside the Western world, most notably in different regions of Asia. The studies of music video in the digital age have explored the many formal and institutional changes that have occurred following the transition of music video from television to online distribution, from MTV to YouTube.