The Music Video in Transformation: Notes on a Hybrid Audiovisual Configuration

Published thirty years apart from each other, two different pieces on music video authored by Will Straw reflect what music video studies has been and has become, respectively. The first of these two articles was published in 1988, in the heyday of MTV, and apart from occupying itself with the very relation between music video and MTV, the article is also otherwise symptomatic of its time in the obligatory focus on the post-modern (Straw, 1988). Envisioned as an updated response to the original piece, the second piece wonders what has become of the music video in the time that has passed, arguing that it is now ‘both ubiquitous and minor’ (Straw, 2018, p.1). The ubiquity of music video is obvious: while music videos are still occasionally shown on television, they are now commonly watched online on a variety of different screens of varying sizes, but they have also infiltrated museums, art galleries, festivals, concert stages and the like. A great many new music videos are uploaded to YouTube on a daily basis, just like many classic videos are now also readily available on YouTube, which has led one of the most prominent audiovisual scholars, Carol Vernallis, to describe YouTube as ‘the world’s largest archive without a librarian’ (Vernallis, 2013, p.152).

Claiming that the music video has simultaneously become minor would thus seem counterintuitive, at least when considering the immense aesthetic spillover from music video into other media as well as the astronomical view counts that the individual clips keep racking up, with the great majority of the most viewed clips on YouTube being music videos. Nonetheless, Straw points to the failure of music video to acquire a presence on the social media platforms of today as one reason for music video’s alleged status as a minor cultural form in the contemporary media landscape, claiming that ‘one looks for videoclips on Youtube [sic] in order to hear a song or initiate a playlist’ whereby ‘the clip itself has become little more than the sheathing in which a song is enclosed’ (Straw, 2018, p.1). Certainly, this status of YouTube as a platform for listening to music has also been noted by other scholars (Liikkanen & Salovaara, 2015); however, one could just as easily imagine turning this argument on its head. As the number of daily clips streamed on YouTube allegedly inches close to 5 billion² – and with a great share of these clips being music videos – it would appear that music video is alive and well, perhaps even that it has only increasingly solidified as a main way of experiencing music altogether. There are also places in the world where YouTube holds the largest market share of all music streaming services, lending support to Diane Railton and Paul Watson’s argument that the increasingly common practice of listening to music via screen-based technologies implicates that ‘there will be an image-track to accompany it’ (Railton & Watson, 2011, p.143).

It is certainly also nothing new to claim that music video is in a state of crisis – or even halfway buried – but if we look back at the history of this ever-changing and protean audiovisual configuration, there is no reason to suspect that this pessimistic diagnosis is true this time around. Obviously, music video has experienced its deal of creative and financial ebbs and flows, like any other cultural form, but it has also proven its survivability time and time again, as confirmed by the increasing number of videos, studios, and directors on the one hand, and by the continuously expanding field of music video scholarship on the other.

Indeed, recent years have witnessed an increasing scholarly interest in the phenomenon of the music video, even to such an extent that some of the recent works point to a paradigmatic ‘music video turn’ (Arnold et al., 2017, p.4) that could be tentatively defined as research into music video’s digital production, circulation platforms, and distribution channels, as well as its new media formations. During the last fifteen years, music video has...