FEATURE:
TikTok Killed the Video Star
PHOTO CREDIT: rasul lotfi/Pexels
Why a Seeming Decline in Music Video Popularity Is a Bad Thing
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THERE is no denying…
PHOTO CREDIT: cottonbro studio/Pexels
the fact that music videos are in decline. The fact that the format has changed. When YouTube launched in 2005, it gave artists this opportunity to have their videos viewed by the world. They did not need to rely on music T.V. Music T.V. barely exists now. I am going to come to a recent feature from The Guardian regarding music videos and how they are being replaced. The move to platforms like TikTok. People watching short clips rather than videos. This is not the first time music videos have been threatened with extinction. Prior to YouTube, music T.V. was declining. The currency and popularity of music was low. It is important to remember how important music videos are when it comes to defining iconic songs and launching artists. The ability for them to put a visual stamp on their songs. How videos can be immortalised and endure through the decades. In 2020, Rolling Stone wrote how YouTube sort of revived the artform of the music video:
“In February 2010, Lady Gaga opened up about her and Beyonce’s “Telephone” music video in an interview for KISS-FM, a month before it premiered simultaneously on E! News and YouTube’s Vevo platform. “What I like about it is it’s a real, true pop event,” she said. “When I was younger, I was always excited when there was a big giant event happening in pop music, and that’s what I wanted this to be.”
Two years earlier, shortly after she made her video debut with “Just Dance,” Lady Gaga had complained to MTV News about the absence of that kind of spectacle. “What’s been lost in pop music these days is the combination of the visual and the imagery of the artist along with the music, and both being as important,” she said. “Even though the carefree nature is something people are latching onto right away about my stuff, I’m hoping that they’ll take notice of the interactive, multimedia nature of what I’m trying to do.”
It’s hard to imagine that at one time, Gaga had to convince her audience to “take notice” of the visual aspects of her brand, and not just because of the meat dress. Nowadays, “interactive, multimedia” artists are the name of the game; Instagram and Twitter are just as crucial to the pop ecosystem as streaming numbers and festival ticket sales. Fan-driven content and interaction online are what drive major label signees to international stardom and, in recent years, have turned unknowns into major celebrities, with the “Old Town Road” story standing as the most prominent example. And at the forefront of the digital video revolution has been none other than YouTube.
By the time YouTube was founded in 2005, MTV had already switched its main programming to reality shows, but the newfound accessibility for fans to search for their favorite music videos online put another dent in the videos-on-cable model. At the same time, “viral” non-music videos on YouTube were engaging with a new kind of eye-popping aesthetic. Wacky and nonsensical clips hosted on the platform, like “Chocolate Rain” and “Shoes,” became some of the earliest internet memes to enter mainstream culture, popular for their spontaneity, low-budget look, and general weirdness.
Naturally, some music videos sought to replicate this: OK Go practically built their career on gimmick-y, lo-fi videos like 2006’s “Here It Goes Again,” where the band performs an elaborate, one-take dance routine on treadmills in front of a stationary camera. It’s the type of stunt that would be right at home on Tik Tok in 2020, but at the dawn of YouTube, there really wasn’t any music video like it. OK Go actually performed the routine at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards — a goofy and unintentional way, on MTV’s part, of passing the torch to a new platform.
Enter Beyoncé, who inadvertently demonstrated what it takes to make a viral video (and how not to do it) when she released two visuals, simultaneously, in 2008. You couldn’t ask for a better experiment: two music videos, both from the I Am Sasha Fierce… album, both directed by Jake Nava, both in black-and-white. “If I Were a Boy” was more conceptual, with a gender-flipped narrative and higher production value. “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” was simpler, a dance video based off an old Bob Fosse routine and filmed on a white soundstage. When both videos premiered one after the other on TRL, there was only video that went viral, spawning an entire dance craze and sweeping the VMAs the following year.
“I don’t think any of us predicted the amount of parodies it would attract,” Nava would later say about “Single Ladies.” “It’s a testament to Beyoncé’s mind-boggling talent and to the fact that sometimes, less really can be more.”
Gaga arrived on the scene shortly thereafter, working with visionary directors like Melina Matsoukas, Francis Lawrence, and Jonas Akerlund to achieve her vision: a gussied-up version of the queer, New York arthouse trash she’d idolized. What was so genius about her videos was that they didn’t need a gimmick to create buzz — she was the gimmick. The same could be said for the best Jackson and Madonna videos. But what sets digital-forward videos like “Paparazzi” and “Bad Romance” apart from their earlier counterparts is that within their outlandish premises, there are a plethora of smaller, absurd moments that fly by at lightning speed: Metropolis crutches, dead models, Minnie Mouse makeup, giant eyes in a bathtub, suspending crystals, monster claws. Meme-ready moments, before there were even really memes.
It took until the middle of the 2010s for artists to take full advantage of Instagram, a visual-heavy platform that couldn’t host full music videos (yet) but could certainly promote them — as long as those videos fell in line with the sleek, lightly fluorescent look that the social network prioritized. Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” which premiered on Apple Music before launching wide on YouTube, fit the Instagram aesthetic perfectly, and the brightly-colored, minimalist promotional photos for the clip drew viewers in.
It’s this long-term fan development that has incentivized artists to once again make videos a high priority; because of the disconnected nature of streaming and the rapid decline of physical album sales, videos are often the best way to draw news fans to an artist and to strengthen their relationship with existing ones. Recent developments in videos, both on and off YouTube, have worked to further capitalize on this relationship. Beyoncé released her visual album Lemonade as a televised event on HBO, before making it available exclusively on Tidal, the streaming platform she co-owns. Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next” was the first to utilize YouTube’s Premiere feature, attracting a reported 829,000 viewers to its live video premiere and chatroom. In an attempt to further increase streaming numbers for the single, which had been released several weeks prior to the video, Grande’s team also uploaded a “teaser” for the music video and a behind-the-scenes montage clip that both contained the entire song, further boosting the single’s chart status.
In recent years, the biggest overall shift in music videos has been the optimization for mobile platforms. It’s not uncommon now to see videos in square or vertical aspect ratios, designed for mobile phone video players or Instagram’s grid display. Post Malone recently released a “dual-phone” video for “Circles,” which required the song to be played simultaneously on two different playlists on two phones side-by-side.
This doesn’t mean that music videos will be leaving YouTube anytime soon: Google has made every indication that they want to remain the industry’s flagship video platform. But in order for them to do so, adaptation is necessary, not just from the platform and its formats but from artists who are allowed to work outside the box and bring their visual endeavors to life”.
A new report has shown how song lyrics have become more repetitive, simpler and self-obsessed. If we are embracing or popularising songs that are like this, it figures that something as fulsome as a music video might not appeal. Do people now have the desire to watch videos when you can get short clips? Do the visuals really matter now? With teasers and clips of songs available on Instagram and TikTok, the music video seems less relevant. Maybe a few iconic and modern-day classics will show how vital music videos have always been. The Guardian discussed how TikTok is threatening the long-term survival of music videos:
“In increasingly turbulent times for the music industry, one aspect has remained steadfast: its passion for stats. At the start of the decade – with YouTube a strong metric of success after the collapse of CD sales – you couldn’t move for mind-bending figures being trumpeted about music video viewership. In 2021, for example, K-pop boyband BTS’s Butter video amassed a staggering 108m views in 24 hours, breaking a record that appeared to be eclipsed on a weekly basis. Butter now sits on a not-too-shabby 950m views, a figure dwarfed by Katy Perry’s jungle-based Roar (3.9bn), Mark Ronson’s retro fantasia Uptown Funk (5.1bn) and Luis Fonsi’s Justin Bieber-assisted 2017 smash, Despacito, which has 8.4bn views.
The two dominant global forces in recent years have been K-pop and Latin music, and their big-budget music videos still rule the roost (Shakira and the Colombian singer Karol G’s TQG video was viewed more than a billion times last year). For Anglo-American pop in 2024, however, a seismic shift has occurred: music video viewership has plummeted, Beyoncé and Drake have stopped releasing videos altogether and pop’s A-list are struggling to make a dent on a platform they previously dominated.
Since its release in November last year, the video for Houdini – the long-awaited lead single from Dua Lipa’s third album – has been viewed 93m times, making it only the 27th biggest of her career. Ariana Grande’s Yes, And? clip is only on 51m views after two months; she has eight hits with over a billion. Ed Sheeran’s 2023 Eyes Closed video, meanwhile, is stuck on 77m views. Even Taylor Swift – who essentially is the music industry – isn’t immune, with Anti-Hero, the lead single from 2022’s Midnights, on a so-so 192m views. No one is suggesting any of these artists are flopping – Anti-Hero’s Spotify streams stand at 1.4bn, while each of the songs mentioned peaked at No 2 or higher in the UK – but tricky questions remain: is the music video dying out? And if so, what’s killing it?
“Asking people to stay on one page for the full length of a track in an era of scrolling is really difficult,” says Hannah T-W, an artist manager and the former head of music videos at production company Somesuch. “It’s now not a normal viewing practice. People are used to much shorter clips and devouring things really quickly.” Those “much shorter clips” proliferate due to the music industry’s latest obsession, TikTok, where songs provide backing music to user-generated clips, or as #content performed by pop stars almost through gritted teeth. Gone are the halcyon days of making a single, getting it to radio, chucking it on MTV and sitting back to watch it fly. “We’re living in a media consumption age where you have to compete with everything, everywhere, all at once,” says the creative director and music video director Bradley J Calder. “You’re not just up against other music videos, but Netflix, Spotify, TikTok and your own camera roll on your phone.”
There’s now a ripple effect: the drop in viewing figures has meant a drop in video budgets, which in turn can squeeze creativity. “The kinds of briefs I’m seeing now are mind-blowing,” says the director and photographer Olivia Rose, who has worked with Anne-Marie and Jorja Smith. Five years ago, she says, £30,000 would have got you a decent video, but now directors are being expected to use that money for “three visualisers” – the looped images or clips used as placeholders on YouTube – “for three tracks, plus TikTok content and some stills, plus the video”. While creativity can still thrive with tighter budgets, quality can suffer as directors’ skills are stretched. “The music video historically has been, and still is to this day, an art form,” Rose says. “And we’re losing it.”
Lil Nas X has released four videos that have been watched more than 500m times. But despite teasing his controversial new single J Christ – a broadside against the US religious right – for weeks on TikTok, the single bombed and the video plateaued at 18m views. The very online rapper will be au fait with another way to signpost a video’s existence, via memeable moments. O’Keefe confirms these are now being written into the briefs sent out to directors in the hope they will catch tired eyes and turn casual scrollers into fans. As Hannah T-W explains: “You do think about these things when you’re going into those massive music video moments: what’s the money shot of the music video, to use a horrible term?”
Sarah Boardman and Joceline Gabriel, who represent a host of music video directors through their company Hands, cite both general “oversaturation” of visuals and the fact that views are now being split across lyric videos and visualisers [simplified teasers for songs] “and the main video itself” as factors affecting music videos today. They also touch on perhaps a more concerning issue for the industry at large, one involving the “rarity of seeing a new artist with real charisma and hearing a really good track that doesn’t just follow a trend”. With thousands of new songs and videos being uploaded each week, cutting through the noise has become more and more important”.
In 2022, this feature talked about the history and evolution of the music video. How platforms like TikTok are changing the way we view music. Maybe budgets and potential profit means that artists are finding new ways to promote singles. The comparative risk and low reward of the music video is too much. As I will go on to explain, music videos were a way into songs for me. When I think of so many classic and important songs, it is their videos that leap to mind:
“On August 1, 1981, MTV began broadcasting on cable television. The first video it played was highly symbolic: The Buggles’ Video Killed The Radio Star. The music video era had begun. The genre would become central to pop culture. In the 1980s and 1990s, it gave rise to pop’s most recognizable stars, introduced a generation of cultural icons and colonized its viewers’ eyes and ears, as songs became inextricably associated with the imagery of their videos. But that culture began to decline around the arrival of the internet, if not shortly before.
“First, music videos on open channels disappeared, because record labels tried to recover their losses from pirating by charging significant amounts to broadcast them, so they could only be seen on pay TV. There was some competition for the audience, even though it was always light years away from the viewership of film, sports or documentaries. But the most torrid Latino music videos were always a good night-time option for platforms without porn. That lasted until the arrival of YouTube, which almost completely finished off those music video channels,” says Javier Lorbado, who was the director of the well-known Spanish music studio Sol Música from 1997 to 2014 and now works as a freelance digital communication specialist for artists, record labels and managers.
In March, Rosalía released her album Motomami with an exclusive performance for the social platform, including live performances of her songs and interviews with her celebrity friends. While Generation Z is TikTok’s primary audience, though, idols from other generations have also begun experimenting with the platform. Most unexpected has been this week’s news that Pink Floyd have made their entire song catalog available in TikTok’s sound library, and they will begin regularly posting exclusive videos on the platform.
@motomamivideo la fama ❤️🔥 | motomami tiktok live | #rosalia #motomami #lafama #parati #foryou #fyp #viralvideo ♬ sonido original - motomami
“It’s more and more common for people to discover music on TikTok, and if you’re not present there, you’re going to be closing off an immense opportunity for promotion. A new generation of users who may have never heard Pink Floyd could now discover them,” says Laura Estudillo, who, after working in communications at Warner, founded the agency Panorámica in 2017 and works with artists including Chanel and Alizzz. Estudillo adds that “the most important thing is for the artist to feel comfortable with the content that they share. If they do it without enthusiasm, or it seems forced, the audience will notice it, and that can be counterproductive on platforms like TikTok. The great attraction of the platform is its unprecedented capacity for making things viral. Without even having followers, the algorithm can make you into a star, which will be reflected in YouTube videos, Spotify streams and ticket sales.”
But it also brings a paradigm shift to the video format. “TikTok creates a severe attention deficit. They are extending the time that videos can last, but they don’t work as well as the short ones, and you still can’t upload an entire song. For the artist, the content they make on the platform is an extra addition. And in the best case of TikTok success, having a viral audio considering the competition out there is almost a miracle,” says Ainhoa Marzol, an expert in digital trends. “If years ago you’d told me that content consumption would be in a vertical format, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Laura Estudillo adds. “Now even screens at festivals are adapted to the format of stories.” “As a social network, I prefer Instagram, but without a doubt, TikTok is the key right now,” says musician and performer Bea Pelea. “It lets you create cheaper, more accessible audiovisual content that can give a pretty significant push.”
Logically, the economic returns vary according to the artist’s popularity. For independent artists, budgets are very low: between €1,000 and €5,000 per music video, while a 30-second commercial can cost €180,000 on average. That also creates frustrations among musicians with a low profile. “I would have liked to record more videos, because they’re important to me, but I want to do cool, up-to-date things, and our economic possibilities don’t allow that,” says Bea Pelea. The business is also tough for producers: everything is done as a favor. Luis Cerveró confesses that he stopped directing videos in 2018, when his first child was born. “A week before, I finished shooting my last one, but since then I decided that I would only leave home to do paid work.” That video had a budget of €6,000, but it is almost always assumed that the money goes entirely to production. “Nobody gets paid, not the camera people, not the makeup artists. I’ve been paid twice in my life to make a video, and I’ve made more than 60. One time very early in my career, I shot a Niños Mutantes video and I kept the entire budget, because I really needed it, and the other time is when I did the second Pharrell Williams video [Come Get It Bae] because I I felt really stupid shooting the first one [Marilyn Monroe] and not charging anything for it.” Cerveró was one of the millennium’s most in-demand independent music videos directors, and he has worked with international artists such as Battles, Liars and Javiera Mena.
@directedbymalikmedia How to shoot a low budget music video! 1. Find a location which is free to use 2. Get yourself a light, could even be a flashlight (if shooting at night) 3. Buy or rent a cheap mic to add that raw feeling to the music video! 4. Don’t over do it with crazy camera movements, keep it clean, simple & cinematic 🎥 - #ukrapper #musicartists #rapper #freestyle #musicvideo #videography #lowbudget #cinematic #simple #malikmedia #blackmagic #bmpcc #bmpcc6k ♬ original sound - MalikMedia
“For an artist, it is essential to keep thinking about having the largest possible number of videos of all their releases,” says Javier Lorbada. “It may no longer be so important to have a large budget to make an old-fashioned music video with meticulous photography, makeup, hairdressing, lighting, special effects and amazing editing. The digital world constantly demands new content in order to achieve greater exposure and reach the largest possible number of viewers. That forces artists and their companies to constantly post new music videos of the same song. In addition to the video clip, many have lyric videos, visualizations, duets, studio versions, at home, acoustic, in the rehearsal room. The truth is that this strategy works. The more videos you have, the better results you get.”
“If we talk in economic terms, it is very difficult to make a profit,” says Laura Estudillo. “You have to be very well-positioned to be able to monetize it. For labels that cover the costs, it is also difficult to earn back their investment, but they generally have more muscle to put together digital marketing campaigns that help them get views. There are more and more artists who decide not to make videos, but even so, it is still a good promotional tool. You can get more attention in digital media if you release a song with a video. You can promote it on platforms by adapting the format to small or vertical clips, and, above all, it continues to be one of the most efficient tools that a group has to present itself to an audience. I think of Rosalía or C. Tangana as current referents of Generation Z who have been able to build very powerful iconography around their image, and the importance of their videos is undeniable. Although the platforms allow us to give the artist another dimension through photos or stories, music videos continue to have the strength of placing the artist in a utopian, highly aspirational dimension.”
“In the 1980s and 1990s the video clip explored itself as art and played with it a bit. But I think that this is all outdated today. Its function is more aesthetic. It serves, above all, to mark or emphasize the tone that the artist wants to give to their own image,” points out Ainhoa Marzol. “But I don’t think it’s going to go away. Music is a sentimental industry that is really fond of doing things the way they’ve always been done. What I do think is that the form will expand. We are already seeing videos adapted to Spotify, others with key moments to play on TikTok. If the metaverse goes anywhere,, I would imagine some more interactive video clips within it, perhaps similar to albums in the format of video games, like Sayonara Wild Hearts,” the journalist concludes”.
Things are changing. Take The Veronicas. The Australian duo of Lisa Origliasso filmed the music video for their new song, Here to Dance, on a shoestring budget. They shot it on an iPhone. Maybe a perfect representation and embodiment of how artists favour something simple, easy and low-concept, it is a shame that modern technology and desires means that music videos are not as important as they once were. I am not against people filming videos on their phones or watching short clips, though it does seem to be a regression. How many of these videos will be remembered and remain in the memory? It is almost a disposable artform now. Part of the creative process rather than a chance for an artist to take a song to a new level. When I grew up, videos for tracks like Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun, Björk’s Army of Me and Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer stuck in my mind. They made me realise that videos could be art. Something so much bigger. I appreciate that a lot of artists do not have big budgets. Especially independent ones. That is fair. Rather than necessarily release a music video for all singles, artists could invest in the occasional ambitious video. A way of ensuring that these songs and videos survive for years. I think that TikTok and the way artists visualise their singles now is ephemeral and is not about quality. It is about ease and affordability. So many people I know maybe not attracted to music videos because they are not as eye-catching and innovative as in the past. That does not need to be the case.
I do think that there is value and relevance regarding the music video. Music is still a visual medium. The fact that we watch so many clips and videos shows that people are not simply listening to the songs. Videos give story and layers to a song. We have an appetite for film and T.V. It is not the case that we are turning away from visuals and the video medium. I do wonder whether platforms like TikTok are a good thing. Whilst they provide easy access for artists to put out clips and engage with a large audience without spending a lot of money, everything seems to be temporary. All about quickly getting something out there. I worry about endurability and longevity. I don’t buy that artists do not make videos because they are expensive. Some of the most legendary videos ever were made on a small budget. Think of something like Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit or even Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer. Time-consuming, sure, but not a massive budget. Perhaps, is it patience and the effort needed to make a good video putting people off? I do feel that a few modern classics can help reverse things. Maybe Taylor Swift is an example of a modern artist who is very much concerned with the cinema and scope of a video and how it can resonate. She does have a bigger budget to work with, yet there are independent/smaller artists who are making clever and original videos. It is an artform that we can not let die. Think ahead generations. I wonder how we will remember music. Will we talk about particular songs without music videos the same as we talk about ones from the past? Without that visual stamp and something visual, what is the future going to look like? Music videos still have a place. Some of my favourites from the past few years have come from artists like Little Simz and Self Esteem. Phasing music videos out or saying that they are irrelevant in the modern age is…
A terrible cut and bad take.