The Purpose of a Music Video in the digital age

The purpose of a music video is fairly obvious as it's to sell the song! However it also sells other products such as:

• The album the song is featured on
• if the song has been written for a film it adversities that
• an upcoming tour
• t-shirts

Also many music videos consist of product placement. This includes stuff like electric products, drinks, food etc.  a fantastic example of this is All Time Low, I Feel Like Dancin' as, although its just a joke it shows product placement of Rockstar energy. The reason for product placement is to show that the drink is desirable making the audience also want to try it. It also makes the audience think "Well if they have it, it must be good!" and they will go out and buy the product.

Before the digital age Music Video's could only be accessed at certain times like a certain slot on the radio or even on shows like Top of the Pops of Top 40. But thanks to the development of new media technologies music videos can be accessed whenever at any time! One site where videos can be accessed anywhere is YouTube. This allows record companies to upload their videos for a wide audience who can watch the video on a mobile device, laptop, mac book, iTouch etc. This means that the song and artist get a lot of publicity. 

However this meant that the public might not buy an actual physical copy of the song if they can listen to it on-line for free so a few record company's refused to upload the songs on-line. But many record companies have realised that trying to keep the songs off YouTube is time consuming, expensive and futile. Therefore most record companies such as Rise Records upload the songs with a link to iTunes to purchase a copy legally. Although some artists have their own YouTube channel, like My Chemical Romance, with links to their social networking sites, iTunes and also their website. Also music shows such as the voice have their own YouTube channel. 

One Major YouTube music channel is Vevo which has been created specifically for music videos. They gain profit from having adverts before the video and gain money depending on how large the audience is for a video.