Michael Jackson and the Music Video

With the death of Michael Jackson, MTV has actually gone back to showing music videos again. In a lot of the press reports about Jackson's death, it has been mentioned how his work defined the possibilities of medium, broke ground for other African American artists, and included major Hollywood talents.

Consider the full length video for "Bad" (in two parts), directed by Martin Scorsese:






Jackson's work is very important to the history of the music video and to popular music as a whole. However, it is also important to note how the music video itself has changed. This article from CBS points out that a hit music video no longer moves album sales and the form has gravitated from the television to the Internet, which has changed the fundamental purposes and means of video directors:

Record labels don’t see the same returns on music videos as they saw during the ‘80s and early ‘90s, so they are less willing to spend large amounts of money. Plus, there’s simply no place for them on television anymore. For the past decade, MTV’s programming has focused on reality programming, and VH1 and BET are following suit.

Even "Total Request Live," the last daytime show left on MTV dedicated to top music videos, has been canceled. Does this mean MTV, of all things, killed the video star? Not exactly.

The problem with the old-school model is that, like many old-school models, it wasn't prepared for the Internet. Why would someone wait around to catch a music video on TV when it was available online instantly? Viewership declined, then ad revenue, steering television executives away from music and towards original content. Music videos migrated to the web, and everything about them shrunk, from screen to scope.

"If I had written my book a few years prior [to 2008], I would have said music videos had come and gone," said Austerlitz. "But with their migration to the Internet, there has been a rebirth and a resurgence of interest in the form.

Removing music videos from their market-driven function may actually serve to make them better and more artistically interesting pieces of cinema. Already we have seen major film directors, like David Fincher, who have come from the format and the style has certainly been embraced in contemporary editing. But maybe now the influence can shift the other way, with music videos taking cues from narrative film.