Music Video Theory
Simon Friths Music Theory (1988)
Simon Friths theory was that all music videos fall under three categories: performance, narrative and conceptual. Performance is the artist performing their song, narrative is where there is some sort of storyline helping the audience to relate to them. The last one is conceptual music videos which don’t tend to have a story and are very open to interpretation and what the viewer thinks about them.
Performance
Performance based music videos are music videos in which the artist or band is seen performing their song. There is normally footage of the artist or band behind the scenes practising or showing how music is important to them along with them performing. The main purpose of performance based music videos is normally self-promotion. An advantage of a performance based video is that the audience feels more connected to the artist or band as it feels like they are watching them live. Another advantage is that it can help promote the artist or band as the fans are given a taste of what they are like live. For example, in the video for Jay Z and Kanye West’s Song “in Paris” the video show how crazy the crowd is going which can interest the audience to buy tickets for the artist’s future concerts as they like the look of it. Also, performance based music videos are usually much cheaper to produce than a narrative or a conceptual. A disadvantage of a performance based videos is that the video can get repetitive quite quickly