In more and more turbulent instances for the music trade, one facet has remained steadfast: its ardour for stats. In the beginning of the last decade – with YouTube a robust metric of success after the collapse of CD gross sales – you couldn’t transfer for mind-bending figures being trumpeted about music video viewership. In 2021, for instance, Ok-pop boyband BTS’s Butter video amassed a staggering 108m views in 24 hours, breaking a file that gave the impression to be eclipsed on a weekly foundation. Butter now sits on a not-too-shabby 950m views, a determine dwarfed by Katy Perry’s jungle-based Roar (3.9bn), Mark Ronson’s retro fantasia Uptown Funk (5.1bn) and Luis Fonsi’s Justin Bieber-assisted 2017 smash, Despacito, which has 8.4bn views.
The 2 dominant international forces in recent times have been Ok-pop and Latin music, and their big-budget music movies nonetheless rule the roost (Shakira and the Colombian singer Karol G’s TQG video was seen greater than a billion instances final 12 months). For Anglo-American pop in 2024, nonetheless, a seismic shift has occurred: music video viewership has plummeted, Beyoncé and Drake have stopped releasing movies altogether and pop’s A-list are struggling to make a dent on a platform they beforehand dominated.
Since its launch in November final 12 months, the video for Houdini – the long-awaited lead single from Dua Lipa’s third album – has been seen 93m instances, making it solely the twenty seventh greatest of her profession. Ariana Grande’s Sure, And? clip is barely on 51m views after two months; she has eight hits with over a billion. Ed Sheeran’s 2023 Eyes Closed video, in the meantime, is caught on 77m views. Even Taylor Swift – who primarily is the music trade – isn’t immune, with Anti-Hero, the lead single from 2022’s Midnights, on a so-so 192m views. Nobody is suggesting any of those artists are flopping – Anti-Hero’s Spotify streams stand at 1.4bn, whereas every of the songs talked about peaked at No 2 or greater within the UK – however difficult questions stay: is the music video dying out? And in that case, what’s killing it?
“Asking individuals to remain on one web page for the total size of a monitor in an period of scrolling is de facto tough,” says Hannah T-W, an artist supervisor and the former head of music movies at manufacturing firm Somesuch. “It’s not a standard viewing apply. Individuals are used to a lot shorter clips and devouring issues actually shortly.” These “a lot shorter clips” proliferate because of the music trade’s newest obsession, TikTok, the place songs present backing music to user-generated clips, or as #content material carried out by pop stars nearly by means of gritted enamel. Gone are the halcyon days of creating a single, getting it to radio, chucking it on MTV and sitting again to observe it fly. “We’re residing in a media consumption age the place you must compete with every part, all over the place, abruptly,” says the inventive director and music video director Bradley J Calder. “You’re not simply up in opposition to different music movies, however Netflix, Spotify, TikTok and your individual digital camera roll in your cellphone.”
There’s now a ripple impact: the drop in viewing figures has meant a drop in video budgets, which in flip can squeeze creativity. “The sorts of briefs I’m seeing now are mind-blowing,” says the director and photographer Olivia Rose, who has labored with Anne-Marie and Jorja Smith. 5 years in the past, she says, £30,000 would have gotten you an honest video, however now administrators are being anticipated to make use of that cash for “three visualisers” – the looped photos or clips used as placeholders on YouTube – “for 3 tracks, plus TikTok content material and a few stills, plus the video”. Whereas creativity can nonetheless thrive with tighter budgets, high quality can endure as administrators’ expertise are stretched. “The music video traditionally has been, and nonetheless is to this day, an artwork type,” Rose says. “And we’re shedding it.”
It’s an artwork type that has the flexibility to create immediate visible iconography (assume Smells Like Teen Spirit or … Child One Extra Time), cement artists as visible innovators in addition to musical ones (see Björk’s mind-bendingly outre aesthetic or Missy Elliott’s splashy, DayGlo surrealism) and create such anticipation that video premieres grow to be watercooler moments. (One workplace I labored in got here to a standstill so everybody may watch the YouTube premiere of Girl Gaga’s Dangerous Romance, an expensive visible feast of white latex, Thriller-esque choreography and bed-based incineration.) It was additionally an artwork type that was amplified by 24-hour music channels. Lots of these are actually lengthy gone or going – Kerrang! TV, Kiss TV and The Field will all be axed this 12 months, homeowners Channel 4 introduced in January – and YouTube algorithms appear to favour the corporate’s personal shortform platform and TikTok rival, Shorts.
One man who has seen the rise and fall of music movies earlier than is Mike O’Keefe, vice-president of inventive at Sony. “Music movies have been my profession for the final 35 years and I nonetheless assume it’s an necessary a part of what an artist does,” he says, whereas admitting that there was a drop off in numbers. TikTok, he says, is nice at serving to to share songs, however he’s much less enamoured of its capacity to create visible worlds. “Tracks on TikTok may be profitable with user-generated content material visuals – it’s not consultant of the artist in that sense.”
Lil Nas X has launched 4 movies which have been watched greater than 500m instances. However regardless of teasing his controversial new single J Christ – a broadside in opposition to the US spiritual proper – for weeks on TikTok, the only bombed and the video plateaued at 18m views. The very on-line rapper will likely be au fait with one other solution to signpost a video’s existence, through memeable moments. O’Keefe confirms these are actually being written into the briefs despatched out to administrators within the hope they’ll catch drained eyes and switch informal scrollers into followers. As Hannah T-W explains: “You do take into consideration this stuff once you’re going into these huge music video moments: what’s the cash shot of the music video, to make use of a horrible time period?”
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Sarah Boardman and Joceline Gabriel, who characterize a bunch of music video administrators by means of their firm Palms, cite each normal “oversaturation” of visuals and the truth that views are actually being cut up throughout lyric movies and visualisers [simplified teasers for songs] “and the primary video itself” as elements affecting music movies at present. In addition they contact on maybe a extra regarding problem for the trade at giant, one involving the “rarity of seeing a brand new artist with actual charisma and listening to a actually good monitor that doesn’t simply comply with a pattern”. With 1000’s of latest songs and movies being uploaded every week, slicing by means of the noise has grow to be increasingly necessary.
“We’re hungry for greatness proper now,” agrees Calder, whose work on the Canadian pop star Tate McRae’s current album marketing campaign – together with glossy and trendy performance-based visuals that recall 00s Britney and appear like, in accordance with Calder, they “belong on MTV, not on TikTok” – has bucked the pattern of diminishing returns from movies, and elevate McRae past pop’s mid-tier. “I don’t assume the music video is lifeless; we simply need it to be higher,” he continues. “We’re residing in a pop desert proper now the place nothing feels too thrilling.”
So what’s the answer? How can the music video survive a fractured ecosystem that’s being bombarded with snacky visuals? “It’s about readdressing the music video as the artwork type it’s,” says Rose. “So making fewer of them, with extra high quality.” Calder, in the meantime, thinks the inventive bandwidth of a brand new artist must be cut up equally between music and the visuals: “At the moment each artist must be a visible artist.” Maybe it’s so simple as ignoring play counts altogether and specializing in extra engaged viewers, suggests O’Keefe: “We’re obsessive about views, however the precise numbers are deceptive: it’s about engagement. Music movies are necessary to the artists and the followers, however probably much less necessary to the informal viewer.”
For the cautiously optimistic Boardman and Gabriel, that is all half of the cycle of an trade recalibrating itself after the explosion of a brand new medium. Whereas we might by no means see such a heavy bombardment of record-breaking YouTube stats once more, a nice music video can stay on effectively past these first 24 hours. “To be a blue plaque artist you’ll at all times want [music videos]; the TikTok stuff gained’t stick in individuals’s reminiscences for 40 years, that’s for positive. Perhaps a day if they’re fortunate!”
