Also present in Times Square is MTV Studios (pictured above). Since the middle of the twentieth century, when television sets were becoming more widespread in the common household, television has had a continued influence on popular music. Music television variety shows such as Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and American Bandstand became popular. In addition to the dancers, stunts, film shorts, and sketches featured on these shows, variety shows also featured performers lip-synching to pre-recorded music. Although not actually live performances, they allowed viewers to watch their favorite artists on a television rather than listening to them on the radio. Additionally, it allowed up-and-coming artists to “break out” by exposing them to the mainstream. According to Tom McCourt and Nabeel Zuberi, television "shapes popular musical culture as much as the sound recordings themselves" (McCourt, Zuberi). While variety shows served as a highly successful mesh between music and television during its time, the launch of MTV (Music Television) on August 1, 1981 explicitly challenged the norms of television programming by airing twenty-four hours of music videos in a constant 'flow', as opposed to the individual programming used by other television networks. The first music video aired by MTV, entitled "Video Killed The Radio Star" by the Buggles, "proved somewhat prophetic as MTV greatly transformed the nature of music industry stardom over the next several years" (Burns). Prior to the airing of this video, MTV creator John Lack famously stated six words that commenced the revolution:
"Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll."

While this clip was already two years old at the time, MTV alone pushed sales for the single to five million copies. Singles are tracks from an album that are individually released for promotional purposes such as airplay on radio stations. While the artist may have some voice in which song is selected, the record label ultimately has the final say because they need the song to be appealing to listeners in order to increase sales. With the arrival of MTV, record companies were quick to join the fad and began overseeing the making of music videos as well. The first music videos aired were provided free of charge by the record companies because it was free advertising for their clients and themselves. Record companies reported rising sales within months.

"Music videos have broken through TV's most hallowed boundaries. As commercials in themselves, they have erased the very distinction between the commercial and the program. As nonstop sequences of discontinuous episodes, they have erased the boundaries between programs" (Aufderheide 57).

While certainly true, Aufderheide's discussion on the impact of music videos was published in March of 1986, only five years after the birth of MTV. Considering that the early 1980s were undoubtedly an exciting time for the music world, it is perhaps why Aufderheide seems to aggrandize music videos as some sort of unforeseeable innovation. However, don't music videos feature the same lip-synching present in the variety shows of the pre-MTV era? Music videos did not emerge out of nowhere, but were merely an adaptation of what came before it. Nor was MTV as revolutionary as Aufderheide's premature article, as only a few months later, MTV began "moving toward block programming, and...began to look more like a traditional television schedule" (McCourt, Zuberi).

Although music videos are 'nothing new under the sun,' there have been some interesting instances in history. But before we go into that, we should examine the different types of music videos. Karyn Charles Rybacki and Donald Jay Rybacki, in their cultural analysis of music videos, claim that a music video typically consists of at least one of three forms: performance, narrative, or conceptual.

Performance videos, the most prevalent, feature the artist performing, usually on a stage in front of fans. However, nearly all of these videos are not actual live performances. The artist, instead, is lip-synching and/or pretending to play their instrument, while the crowd contains fans and extras, both of which are there to appear in the video. “(Lip-synching) allows the viewer to ‘sing along,’ participating in the celebrity and the dream, perhaps even claiming ownership of the fantasy” (Aufderheide 66). The reason for lip-synching is simple: Have you ever been to a concert where the performance sounded exactly like it did on the album? Of course not. Within the music video, the sales item is the record and so the performance in the video needs to sound exactly like it. Using live performance footage also makes it extremely difficult in post-production to synchronize the cut to performance shots. Nevertheless, Bruce Springsteen was one of the rare few who did use actual concert footage and synchronized the album track to it. And it worked out quite nicely.
Bruce Springsteen - Dancing In The Dark
Nice dance moves, Bruce. The marketing ploy of a performance video is to give you, the viewer, a vicarious, concert-going experience, as if you were a part of the crowd. One would purchase the record through a desire to identify with this crowd and the experience, reminiscing about the music video while listening to the track. This video also demonstrates how powerful music videos, and maybe even MTV, had become. You may recognize that lucky fan who gets pulled on stage at the end of the video as “Friends” star, Courteney Cox. Then a nobody who had appeared in a few commercials here and there, her appearance in the video helped to launch her to stardom.

A narrative video tells a sequential story whose roles may include paid actors, the artist, or both. Love stories are the most common theme. "The narrative pattern is one of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. Action in the story is dominated by males who do things and females who passively react or wait for something to happen" (Rybacki). A-Ha’s "Take On Me" tells the tale of a teenage girl who suddenly becomes a part of the newspaper comic she is reading. What ensues is a series of montages, using rotoscope animation, as she tries to bring the comic’s hero back with her to the other side. Much like The Buggles’ "Video Killed The Radio Star," MTV helped propel the song to number one on the U.S. charts and A-Ha took home eight awards at the MTV Music Video Awards. It was recently listed as number sixteen on MTV’s "Greatest Videos of All Time."
AHA - Take On Me
A conceptual video is a non-sequential story but through imagery and symbolism it can create emotions. It can carry multiple meanings and is open for interpretation, often leaving a lasting impression on the viewer. Ed Gonzalez and Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine hailed "Take On Me" as "one of the most successfully executed concept videos of the early MTV era" (Cinquemani, Gonzalez). While certainly the concept of fantasy vs. reality would deem it a conceptual video, its sequential story-telling does not fall into Rybacki's description of a conceptual video.

Instead let’s look at Madonna’s “Human Nature” which would fall into the category of a conceptual video. While the song serves as a response to the backlash she previously received regarding her use of sexual content, the video complements that with some suggestive imagery. Madonna’s statement is that she’s not sorry for what she did because sex is human nature and she should be able to talk about it. She’s saying that she is here to stay and people should get used to that.
Madonna - Human Nature
What's the deal with the male dancers? Do they represent human nature, as they continually force Madonna into suggestive positions? Why do they were blindfolds? Perhaps they represent her critics. Afterall, those same positions she is forced into make her appear to be trapped, as if she is being held back from what she wants to do. This is also made evident by the use of boxes, representative of cages. The dancers' appearance in the cages could represent the critics' close-mindedness, that they are not going to change. Their minds are trapped. The six boxes could be representative of everybody having their own struggles. At the end of the video, as they appear in one box together, she's saying that neither side is going to change so they're just going to have to deal with each other. Afterall, it's human nature.

Music videos have remained hip for so long because of the infinite amount of video concepts within these three categories. Madonna, not only in this video but in all of her videos, uses them as a means to reinforce her persona. This style has remained influential on many of today's artists. Michael Jackson was another big influence in the music video world, not only for his innovative videos, but also for his appeal to the suburbs. Prior to his stardom, black performers almost never appeared, an issue brought up by many artists including Rick James and David Bowie. While ultimately serving as a hip, new innovation of the time, there has also been some negative reaction to music videos. Many claim that with video came the emphasis of looks within the music world. Talentless, but good-looking, musical performers can now be met with commercial success. It could be argued that looks have become even more important than the music itself, where MTV-viewers may simply mute the video in order to focus more on the performer, admire what they are wearing, maybe even run out to purchase similar articles of clothing. Britney Spears, anyone? This trend may have also contributed to the shift in popular music where performers now lip-synch at their own concerts.

Los Angeles Critic Marc Weingarten writes that, "MTV is the death of the imagination. It has impoverished kids' critical faculties and blunted their abilities to interpret music in a meaningful way for themselves" (DeRogatis). There have been countless times where upon listening to a single, I'll immediately visualize the music video. You watch a video enough times it inevitably becomes fixated into your brain. It subsequently affects my experience with the other songs on the album, those without a music video, to which I find myself struggling to interpret them, attempting to visualize my own corresponding video, endlessly contemplating what the artist was thinking while writing the lyrics, instead of simply appreciating the song for what it is. Perhaps this is what The Buggles meant in their song "Video Killed The Radio Star." Notice the emotional despair in Trevor Horn's vocals, the distortion of his voice as if it were deriving from an old 1950s transistor radio, the blowing up of a television set toward the end of the video..."The group is clearly saying that music matters more than image. But through the contorted looking glass of MTV, the video came to mean exactly the opposite. Bye-bye radio and music, hello video" (DeRogatis).

None of this matters, however, because over the last decade, MTV's ratings have declined and they have had to rely more and more on their non-music programs. When it became apparent that these shows were highly effective towards ratings, MTV began airing more and more new shows. Each year, there was a significant drop in the amount of music played. In current times, there is about an hour of music videos played each morning from 6AM to 7AM. And then there's TRL which doesn't even play the entire music video and is frequently interrupted by screaming fans that nobody cares about. What are these high quality shows that everybody seems to be watching on MTV instead of music videos? They've got overly-dramatic reality shows such as The Real World and Laguna Beach, crude comedies like Jackass, and shallow, stereotype-reinforcing dating shows such as NEXT.

So what does this mean for the future of music videos? To account for the loss of music video programming, music videos have been made available for purchase on iTunes and/or for streaming on such sites as Yahoo! and AOL.com. Through this transition, however, the underlying promotional intentions were lost, and music videos served solely as a means of entertainment, a way for music fans to watch their favorite bands' music videos that they could no longer see or were never able to see on MTV. Since these fans are only searching for bands of familiarity, it becomes harder for new bands to 'break out' without first 'selling out'. But that's another story. Ultimately, music videos have almost completely faded away, however hope is not all lost as a new means of self-promotion has emanated that also makes use of the Internet. Bands such as Queens of the Stone Age are now taking advantage of the spread of information on the Internet. In April 2007, the winners of a QOTSA fan site contest were sent an unreleased track along with a handwritten note asking fans to share the song in any way possible. Clearly, the Internet is the easiest way and, soon thereafter, the song was spreading all across message boards and music blogs. That same month, Queens of the Stone Age posted a promotional video on their official site. Not your ordinary promotional video, but instead a flash video that you'll have to see for yourself (below). This video most likely served as a way to welcome those who had, in some way or another, listened to the released track. The track may attract new fans and the video is there to further promote the album. As nifty as this all sounds, it's also 'nothing new under the sun', but rather the next step, an adaptation of the music video before it. This new trend will probably replace music videos as we know them today. Still want your MTV?
Queens of the Stone Age Promo Video