Planning: Characteristics of Music

Characteristics of Music Videos 

In music videos there is a lot of similar characteristics and this is because of both psychological and economic reasons. 

Song length- is a common issue as it is very important that the music videos                                         are a certain length of time e.g. 3-5 minutes, song longer than that length are                                 often compressed.  

The reason for this is both for psychological reasons, such as, people switching off. people in general have short attention spans so if a music video is too long they will switch off and not watch it. An economic reason is because music companies such as MTV, make there money through adverts so the goal is to get as many videos played and adverts played in the shortest amount of time because that is more money for them and if they have music videos longer than 5 minutes that would prohibit them from playing that song as they can play 2 music videos in that time.  

Concept- there is always a concept in music videos because due to the short length of music videos there isn't enough time to develop characters so directors have to create personas so that people understand and the concept and they strive to create ones that stand out to keep people locked in and watching the whole video, an example of this is Rihanna's- bitch better have my money. There was a lot of controversial aspects which kept people watching and talking about it and that is very important when it comes to music videos, as it keeps music videos current due to the fact that they are constantly being talked about, but artists and directors need to be careful that it doesn't step into morè, thats when it reaches the point of offending people and the video could be banned. 

Fragmentation- In music videos there is a lot of fragmentation of the body, this causes the audience to focus on a particular part of the person or artists. And in general there is a lot of freedom in music videos because there is a lot of time to fill it up, but this depends on what concept you have, some artist use there music videos to promote themselves as dancers or even there products, for instance Lady Gaga and Beyonce when they were promoting the 'Polaroid' camera in the video, and also when Nicki Minaj promotes her drink in her music videos.