Conceptual, Narrative and Performance Based Music Videos

Today, we learnt that there were 3 types of music videos. These 3 types are listed and explained below:

Conceptual Music Videos

Conceptual videos are based around a single idea or concept and are usually unusual and obscure, even surreal for the audience. This unusual content is an attraction to many consumers, which draws them in. A successful concept video will keep the audience entertained and constantly looking at what or who is on the screen. No particular genre or type of music is more likely to use concept videos, in fact a range of artists covering all genres have used concept/ art based videos. The audience does not only watch what is going on but it often makes the audience think about eg the actions that a dancer might do and what you can understand from it. However some people find them confusing and often random because the audience sometimes gets confused as we don't know what is going on. It requires thinking not just common sense.

Narrative Music Videos

A song with a narrative based music video the song includes a narrative story of the lyrics/ words being acted out in some way. This style relies on imagery to produce a story for the audience to follow and some narrative videos include clips from films that the song has been featured in. This seems to be used a lot in slower songs, and often tend to be love stories. Narrative music videos. This might be the artist or lead vocalist of a band, but it is usually an actor as the artist or band would be performing the song. A purely Narrative music video would show no singing and will have a beginning, middle and end. The story may not show everything, like a movie would, but important parts of the actors life.

Performance Based Music Videos

A Performance based music video shows the artist or band performing. Although the artist or band doesn’t have to move and dance, if they are singing, or playing their instrument, than the music video is Performance based. This style of video uses the band/artist/group throughout the majority of the production and the artist, band members are often miming the words to the song. The genre of music where performance videos are common is indie and rock. The costing on this type of production are also most likely to be the lowest as the producers are in effect giving the audience the most realistic image of the band as it is only the band they are showing. The downside of this is that the band will need to be relatively established to pull off the video, or else interest will become saturated.