"It is what it is, and I think anyone who refutes that is an idiot in 2008. We can all agree as a medium music videos really found their place in pop culture in the 1990s, [but they've been] replaced by the Internet in the 21st century... The music video is a dead medium..."
-- Michael Stipe, R.E.M. (via an Associate Press article and pushed out via blog posts by Wired Listening Post and Idolator)
Back when Bjork released her music video magnum opus for "Wanderlust," I was struck with a few questions: "[Can this video] have the kind of impact it should. Can a video get everyone talking? Can there be a big event video ever again, or will we never get back to Thriller? Or, is this more of a an art event than a music video?"
The day of the culture-shifting music video that everyone knows as a flashpoint seems to be over. But, I don't believe it has anything to do with a diminishment in the quality of music videos or a waning interest on behalf of music fans. I think it's largely due to the overwhelming options out there. For example, when The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan there were three channels. Of course a huge majority of TV viewers caught their greatness at the same watershed moment. I couldn't find how many cable channels were available when MTV launched on cable, but this Time Warner Cable lineup from 1986 makes me realize why MTV took off like it did in the '80s. Your options were watching something fresh and hip like music videos on MTV, or a broadcast of Falstaff on A&E or TNN's Mesquite Championship Rodeo. That's very different now. Even the notion of Bruce Springsteen's 1992 lament "57 Channels (And Nothing On)" seems quaint in 2008. My cable box has well over 350 unique channels, catering to each and every niche. More options means less viewers for each. Do music videos get less eyeballs? You bet. Same goes for the World Series, which has been on a steady ratings decline since 1980 while arguably being more popular than ever.
Even though music videos have a much harder time making a broad impact, they are still indisputably popular. YouTube even provides the numbers:
- 13 of the top 20 all time most viewed videos on YouTube as of June 2008 are proper music videos. They're not even viral or amateurish videos. They're honest to goodness, traditional music videos.
- 5 of the top 20 most viewed videos of the month on YouTube for June of 2008 are proper music videos.
Anecdotally, you can also see that almost every massive web site has a big music video component — MySpace, AOL, Yahoo, Video Static (Hey, it's my site. I can say what I want). I hear of new music video sites launching every single week, ranging from big endeavors to smaller blogs and video sharing sites and filters and on and on. Whether music videos — or any other piece of traditional media — can dominate the culture like what happened twenty years ago is another question. But, proclaiming the medium dead seems a bit off — especially when the pronouncement is made the same month that MTV launches a prime time video show.
It's not surprising to hear Michael Stipe personally no longer finds music video relevant. He once reaped huge rewards from MTV and its music video exposure and now finds himself at the end of the long tail, trying to make himself content with debuting a music video to an arena of paying fans, instead of how it was at the band's artistic and commercial peak. Since the breakthrough of "Losing My Religion," there have been music videos to support every single R.E.M. album. Some have been great, like "Electrolite." Some have been a bit less exciting. The fact that none of these newer videos resonated like "Losing My Religion" or "Everybody Hurts" probably speaks more to the increasing cultural clutter and the history of R.E.M than the overall viability of music video as a promotional and artistic tool. After all, the music video fade that Stipe notices does dovetail with the same inevitable sales downturn and stylistic meanderings that followed their landmark 1992 album Automatic For The People. (And, as an R.E.M. fan, I'm compelled to point out that the new album Accelerate is about as good a rebound as you could have hoped for and the multiple feed video for "Supernatural Superserious" was a bold and incredibly cool experiment. That it mostly pleased dedicated fans like me and didn't spread beyond that probably further proves my point.)
This all leads me to a better state of the music video quote about the same phenomenon that Stipe notices:
"There was a time when the music video itself is what happened in culture, but now it's the music video and what everyone has to say about it that is what's happening."
-- Brian Graden, president of MTV programming (Reuters article)
That sounds a bit more on the money. At the risk of sounding like a pompous and/or very stoned moron: The content is no longer the content. It's the reaction to the content that's the new content. It's not about experiencing a music video, it's about incorporating it into your online life and playing an active role in promoting it, remixing it, sharing it and commenting on it. Music videos are at the center of all that activity and interest.
For now, at least.
