On the Death of the Music Video

I am old enough to remember when the music video was a coherent artistic form. I was, specifically, in my early teens during the specific window (roughly 1999 to 2008) when MTV was ending, YouTube was starting, and the music video was briefly occupying both distribution channels at once. The economic conditions during that window produced, for about a decade, some of the most formally adventurous short-form filmmaking of the century.

Those conditions have not held. The music video, as I am about to describe it, is effectively dead. What has replaced it is not what it was.

What the form was

The music video, as a specifically-defined form, was a three-to-five-minute short film shot to accompany and promote a specific pop single. Budgets in the form’s peak ranged from a few hundred thousand dollars for small indie releases to several million for major-label productions. Directors ranged from specific commercial-video auteurs (David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Hype Williams, Anton Corbijn, Floria Sigismondi) to artists who transitioned from music videos into feature filmmaking (Jonze, Fincher, Gondry, Jonathan Glazer, Mark Romanek, Chris Cunningham).

The form had specific conventions and specific freedoms. Videos had to begin and end in the three-to-five-minute range. They had to synchronise, at minimum tangentially, to the song. They usually included specific footage of the performing artist or band. Beyond that, the directors had unusual creative latitude for a commercially-funded form. Major-label music videos could be narrative, abstract, non-narrative, comedic, experimental, animated, hybrid. They could be expensive without being mass-audience-friendly. The form rewarded specific authorial vision.

This is why the form produced, across its peak, a remarkable amount of actually-good short-form filmmaking. Spike Jonze’s “Sabotage” (Beastie Boys, 1994). Michel Gondry’s “Come Into My World” (Kylie Minogue, 2002). Chris Cunningham’s “Come to Daddy” (Aphex Twin, 1997). Hype Williams’ various late-90s Missy Elliott productions. Romanek’s “Closer” (Nine Inch Nails, 1994). The list extends.

What killed it

Several overlapping forces.

MTV stopped playing music videos. Across the early 2000s, MTV’s programming shifted from a music-video-anchored format to reality-television programming. The specific commercial structure that had funded music-video production (cable-television advertising revenue that flowed to the production cost) collapsed.

YouTube did not replace the economic model. YouTube, starting in 2005 and reaching commercial maturity around 2010, provided a distribution channel for music videos but did not provide the same revenue structure. Labels still funded the videos, but the back-end revenue from YouTube views was substantially less than the pre-digital promotional value of music-video play on MTV. The incentive to fund expensive videos declined.

The promotional purpose changed. When MTV was the primary music-video distribution channel, music videos were understood as vehicles for selling albums. The video promoted the song; the song promoted the album; the album generated record sales. The entire economy was oriented around album purchase. When album purchase collapsed as the dominant music-commerce model, the video’s specific promotional function became unclear. What is a music video selling, now, if not an album?

TikTok redefined the form. TikTok, starting around 2018 and reaching dominance by 2020, specifically replaced the three-to-five-minute music video with the fifteen-to-sixty-second song fragment synced to user-generated visual content. The specific visual-sync relationship between song and image that the music video had pioneered was absorbed into a mass-amateur format that did not require professional direction.

What has replaced the form

Nothing, exactly. Several things partially.

The lyric video. A specifically-lower-budget format in which the song’s lyrics are displayed on screen over simple animated or stock-footage backgrounds. Lyric videos exist primarily for YouTube placement and algorithmic search discovery. They are not music videos in the formal sense. They are word-art.

The “visualiser.” A format that consists of a static or minimally-animated visual element (usually the album art, sometimes an abstract motion graphic) playing for the duration of the song. Visualisers exist as YouTube placeholders. They are aggressively not music videos.

The TikTok-native short. A fifteen-to-sixty-second piece of content optimised for platform discovery rather than song-promotion. These are sometimes cut from longer music-video productions, sometimes shot specifically for the short-form platforms. They are not music videos in form or function.

The rare actual music video. Some pop artists at the top of the commercial tier (Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Charli XCX) continue to produce actual music videos in the older sense. Hiro Murai directs for Childish Gambino. Loveshaq has been active. Specific artists have protected the form through sheer commercial insistence. But the total volume of actual music-video production is a small fraction of what it was in the peak years.

What we lost

The music video, as a form, was not just a commercial promotional vehicle. It was, in its best instances, a genuine artistic discipline. The specific constraints (three-to-five-minute runtime, sync to a pre-existing audio track, some relationship to a recognisable musical artist) produced work that was formally adventurous precisely because of the constraints.

Some of that work is still available. The YouTube archive holds the best music videos of the 1990s and 2000s. I revisit them periodically. Michel Gondry’s “Come Into My World” is still one of the most formally impressive single-take shorts I know. Spike Jonze’s “Weapon of Choice” (Fatboy Slim, 2001) still makes me laugh. Chris Cunningham’s “Rubber Johnny” (Aphex Twin, 2005) is still disturbing in exactly the ways it was intended to disturb.

What we have lost is the specific production ecosystem that made those works possible. Young filmmakers in 2025 cannot build music-video-directing careers at the scale they could in 2005. The specific path from music video to feature filmmaking (Jonze to Being John Malkovich, Fincher to Seven, Glazer to Birth) is no longer functioning.

Where the form might survive

I see two specific places where the music-video form could continue to produce interesting work.

Prestige pop productions. The small number of major pop artists who continue to fund actual music videos will continue to support specific directors working in the form. Hiro Murai, Dave Meyers, and others will have ongoing work at this scale. The volume will be small. The quality can be high.

Non-anglophone pop traditions. Korean K-pop has specifically maintained music-video production at scale, with specific choreographic and visual conventions that differ from the Anglo-American tradition. The form, elsewhere in the world, is alive.

Neither of these will restore the 1999-to-2008 ecosystem. What that ecosystem was, historically, is over.

Put on Gondry’s “Come Into My World” tonight. Pay attention to the single-take long-shot choreography. Understand that something specific once existed and, mostly, no longer does.