Videos go to the wall

‘Videos go to the wall’ is an article written by Andy Beckett on ‘the life and death of the pop promo’ and how they are taking music television with them.
His initial point is that ‘Tastes in pop videos – indeed, the taste for pop videos – have shifted and diminished.’ To back up his point he uses the extremely well known song ‘Save a prayer’ by Duran Duran, explaining its plot, highlighting how cliché it is, (very) and the conventions that were very popular in the 80’s in terms of music video. Things such as the big planes, the speedboats, the tropical settings, the suits, the use of slow motion, all of these are seen as very ‘cheesy’ and extremely cliché. Perfect for the eighties then. Also the huge costs that they took to produce; one of Duran Duran’s was rumored to have cost £900,000!
I agree with what Andy Beckett is saying in terms of the taste in and for music videos is shifting and changing, as that is inevitable, after all music videos are a commodity so they will always shift with the trends and contemporary culture. However, I do not believe that they are diminishing.

·Clichés and stereotypes have been ruled out due to the vast range of an artist’s personal view of him or herself.·Music Videos have in general become better with new technologies and new methods of filming them.·Although disjuncture is still very common, many songs follow a narrative which doesn’t involve ‘cheesy’ aspects.

Beckett also includes an interview with Christine Boar in his article, Boar work at MTV in London and she decides what goes on MTV. And in her point of view “It’s not exactly very exciting to have videos on all the time. It’s not interactive. It’s not personable…. When videos first came out, people thought, ‘Wow, someone’s put pictures to music.’ Now, they say, ‘Is the song good?’ People just have MTV on in the background.’ Maybe this could be something to do with what they found out in their research on what people thought of MTV Europe? People thought it was cheesy. But one thing is sure and that is that MTV as a channel is not as popular as it used to be, perhaps due to some of the factors listed below:
· The general opinion was that people thought music videos were cliché and critically rubbish.
· Music videos were also suffering due to the expense to produce them.
· Only one in four households had satellite or cable TV where music videos were shown.
· The emerging truth about music videos is that they were boring.
However, nowadays with the better availability of new technologies, and the new technologies themselves these problems are much easier to solve. So music video is becoming much more a way to ‘show – off’ the talent and ideas of directors, with much better concepts, images and ideas. This also enables the band to create themselves a ‘star image’ using music video. This is all tied together by the widespread use of sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook as these kind of sites enable artists to reach a much larger audience effectively and for free. YouTube particularly solves the issue of satellite or ‘multichannel’ television as more people have the internet than have multichannel television and YouTube has channels dedicated to music videos and artists. So overall ‘Videos go to the wall’ has given me a new perspective on music video and highlighted some of the common problems with music videos such a they are too cheesy or cliché. So it has shown some things that I should steer clear of when producing my media music video.