Redefining Music Video — Dan Moller VFX

Written in 2011 as a part of my Masters in Digial Media, my essay on Redefining Music Video [pdf] has been commonly cited across the web and academia. It’s been super rewarding over the past decade having people reach out from all over the world for a chat about it and what music video means to them.

I found at the time I wrote it that a lot of the dictionary definitions of music video didn’t seem to reflect the common belief about what is and isn’t a music video, and some dictionaries didn’t provide a definition at all. I’d been thinking about the place of music videos in the world for a long time before I wrote the essay, and I’ve still been thinking about them ever since. I offered this definition at the time:

“a short film integrating a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes”

Ten years later, the landscape has shifted further - maybe I need to find some time to write a new essay! We’ve had more work coming out like Beyonce’s ‘Black Is King’ - which sits somewhere between a feature film, a musical, an album, and a seamless sequence of music videos blending into each other, forming one continuous whole.

Not only is the length changing, but interactivity is making inroads too. I’ve been continuing to explore this space myself, with GQ asking if my work for Mark Ronson and King Princess represented ‘The Future of Music Videos’. Fast Company wondered the same, further saying that:

“Someone needs to pick up where MTV and YouTube left off. ”

— Fast Company

My other projects including work with Kylie Minogue for ‘Real Groove’ built on this to further push from ‘music video’ to ‘music experience’. In the end, definitions are all more or less academic. I think what’s important and what’s really changing is what we come to expect from a music artist, and how we expect to be able to interact with them, if not just participate in their music world.

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