Types of Music Videos

There are three main types of music video: Performance, Narrative and Experimental.

Here is an example of a performance based music video. Here we see the band (Tuxedo) performing their song (the same footage

is used as the official music videos for two of their songs however). Performance videos as you can expect, consist of the musicians performing their music. Here is a rather basic performance based video, with minimal and basic shots. This video has a vintage aesthetic however, the camera used for a start looks about twenty years old, which goes with the retro style of this band.

Here is an example of a narrative music video. This song, the Walk is basically about wanting to get a someone out of the singer's life (Mayer Hawthorne). The narrative in the video is however more extreme, with Mayer having a gun fight from who's presumably his girlfriend or wife, which is to emphasize the fact he's singing about a damaging relationship that needs to end. It's an interesting contrast of styles (action is usually associated more with rock music, whilst soul is more associated with more generic romance and so on), however i think this mix works well together nonetheless.

Here's an example of an experimental music video. Experimental videos unlike a narrative do not particularly have a story and can basically be anything. Many show images in tune to the beat of a song etc, which is particularly common with instrumental videos which have no lyrics, or vocals, thus don't often have a narrative. This video, Come to Daddy, shows first an old lady with her dog find a bunch of trash with a TV set in, then it "comes alive" with a face appearing. We then see a bunch of children all with the same face having some cheeky banter and causing mischief, and by the end of the video we see more interesting creatures and characters, including the emergence of who's probably "daddy" and then he's just...there with his kids.

These are the basic different types of music video but obviously they can be mixed, for example you could have a narrative but with some performance in there too, or an experimental video with a narrative and so forth.