Performance, Narrative & Concept Music Videos

Types of Music Video
Over the past 10 years, the development of music videos in the music industry has grown and changed immensely. New technology, abstract images and fresh ideas have encouraged artists these days to expand how they represent themselves in their music videos. 
There are three main types of music video; performance, narrative and concept. There are also a range of mixture and animated videos which are not as well known as a ‘type’ of music video.

Performance
A performance video focuses on showing footage of the artist or band either in a casual environment, i.e. socialising with friends, or performing, live performance or staged performance. This style of video uses the band/artist/group throughout the majority of the production and the artist, band members are often miming the words to the song. The genre of music where performance videos are common is indie and rock. The costing on this type of production are also most likely to be the lowest as the producers are in effect giving the audience the most realistic image of the band as it is only the band they are showing. The downside of this is that the band will need to be relatively established to pull off the video, or else interest will become saturated.

Concept

Concept videos are based around a single idea or concept and are usually unusual and obscure, even surreal for the audience. This unusual content is an attraction to many consumers, which draws them in. Concept videos usually are combined with one of the other two styles as the market demands for greater accessibly rather than the somewhat niche that is pure concept art. A successful concept video will keep the audience entertained and constantly looking at what or who is on the screen. No particular genre or type of music is more likely to use concept videos, in fact a range of artists covering all genres have used concept/ art based videos.

Narrative
A song with a narrative based music video the song includes a narrative story of the lyrics/ words being acted out in some way. This style relies on imagery to produce a story for the audience to follow and some narrative videos include clips from films that the song has been featured in. This seems to be used a lot in slower songs, and often tend to be love stories

Animation & Mixture

Animated music videos can range from the images being hand drawn, created by computer graphics or moulded out of material such as plasticine. This style of music video is very creative and creativity and visually entertaining to watch.

A song with a ‘mixture’ music video consists of more than one of the above. The most common video types to combine are performance and narrative.