Music videos are weird. They were all the rage in the early 80s so much that they spawned entire cable channels like MTV and MuchMusic, neither of which actually play music videos any more. When cable (and Much) first came to my hometown in 1984, it was totally a thing to go to someone's house and just have a video-watching party. But like all fads, that kind of faded after a few years ....
But the videos themselves became a sort of mandatory marketing tool for the music industry, so I guess they still get made, though now you have to sort through YouTube or wherever to find them.
I always thought that they went out of style because they got dull and boring. If you look at the earliest videos, they usually tell a visual narrative about what's going on in the song, or, if the song has no narrative, they'd at least be trying to ... do interesting stuff (The Cure being trapped in a sinking box was .. different.) But then, popularity bred laziness, and you got more and more of just shots of the singer/band singing, and less and less "fun stuff". See: Land of Confusion by Genesis, and We're Not Going To Take It by Twisted Sister, or hell, even East of Eden by Big Country.
I have never seen the video for that song before. Weird, cause I have heard that song like 10 trillion times.
Music videos are weird. They were all the rage in the early 80s so much that they spawned entire cable channels like MTV and MuchMusic, neither of which actually play music videos any more. When cable (and Much) first came to my hometown in 1984, it was totally a thing to go to someone's house and just have a video-watching party. But like all fads, that kind of faded after a few years ....
But the videos themselves became a sort of mandatory marketing tool for the music industry, so I guess they still get made, though now you have to sort through YouTube or wherever to find them.
I always thought that they went out of style because they got dull and boring. If you look at the earliest videos, they usually tell a visual narrative about what's going on in the song, or, if the song has no narrative, they'd at least be trying to ... do interesting stuff (The Cure being trapped in a sinking box was .. different.) But then, popularity bred laziness, and you got more and more of just shots of the singer/band singing, and less and less "fun stuff". See: Land of Confusion by Genesis, and We're Not Going To Take It by Twisted Sister, or hell, even East of Eden by Big Country.
Deutschland by Rammstein is modern example of a video done right.