The first music video to debut on MTV was The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” which landed on the network in 1981. That began a love affair with the medium, which would last for over 20 years, culminating with Total Request Live.
Debuting in 1998, TRL was instrumental in the careers of artists such as Eminem, Jay Z, 50 Cent, and many others. The show was often used to introduce new music on a national scale, which had fans clamoring to see what music and what visuals their favorite artists could come up with. BET’s version of the show, 106 & Park, debuted in 2000, placing its focus squarely on hip-hop and R&B.
However, TRL has since gone the way of the dodo, and the hype and emphasis on music videos has gone down considerably in the past decade, which leads us to ask, did the Internet kill the video star?
The proof is in the spending. In the late ‘90s, the price of music videos began to skyrocket. The Notorious B.I.G. invested a staggering $1 million into his video for “Hypnotize.” Hype Williams became the go-to director, filming massive-scale, generally gradiose music videos in exotic locales such as Busta Rhymes’ “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See” and Jay Z’s “Big Pimpin’.” But in the late 2000s, even stars such as Nas began employing lower budget videos such as “Sly Fox,” directed by Rik Cordero. With a reduced return on the investment, there was no longer such a strong incentive for artists to pour so many resources into their visuals.
In the past decade, the Internet made music so accessible with so many websites devoted to delivering media at unprecedented amounts and rates that the music video just didn’t stand out nearly as much as it did before. Sure, you would still get visuals for your favorite songs, but it would also come with countless video, audio and written interviews with the artist, other tracks released by the artist, and a slew of other media. With the rise of online media, the floodgates opened.
Ultimately, the question remains: Did the Internet render the music video obsolete? The answer is no, but it did significantly reduce its impact. YouTube is one of the most highly trafficked websites with some artists garnering hundreds of millions of views of their music videos. For example, Justin Bieber recently became the first artist to eclipse 1 billion views of a single video, so clearly people are still checking for their favorite videos.
In the end, the rise of mass online media has deemphasized the music video primarily for well-known artists. Underground artists have benefitted tremendously from the advent of sites like YouTube, which provide them with an avenue to release their own videos. So while the music video doesn’t carry the importance and excitement it once did, it’s still a staple of our music media diet in 2014.
