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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 2498565" data-attributes="member: 151">I see what you're saying, and I agree...to a point.  I think you undervalue the power of the video, particularly when they were new.  I remember middle-school and high-school, and how many videos in and off themselves were a topic of conversation...especially when they were linked together, often as a story of sorts.  And let's not forget, MTv does still show videos...just not at the times or in the quantity they used to.  Scoring a spot on Total Request Live is still a powerful marketing tool; the difference now is that the videos no longer have their huge appeal.  Certainly, a good video won't sell bad music (although that was argued pretty strongly in the early 80s, as I mentioned), but a bad video could hurt a good song.I don't mean to make the case that the music was ancillary to the popularity of the bands...but Greg Kihn, for example, didn't break out of his local music scene on to the national one solely based on his music.  He, like plenty of other bands, reached the attention of a large audience because of his videos.  Yes, they were a gimmick...but if he hadn't made a video when videos were still a fledgling tool, he wouldn't have rose to stardom (and later plummeted just as quickly) without it.  Consider someone like Huey Lewis and the News or Chris De Burgh, consider the Fixx or Alphaville or aha.  All of them have continued to put out music for the last 20 years - but they have been shunted to the back bins of the world,  where many no longer even know they still put out albums.In the 1982-1984 period, we had what was collectively called the Second British Invasion.  So pervasive was it, that for the first time ever (and only time since then) there were more British acts on the charts than American ones in the US Charts.  Why?  MTV.  All those bands had videos ready and willing to go, and MTV needed to fill the airwaves.  It took several years for US acts to catch up.  When they did, MTVs first true golden period was over....the field had been leveled.  Videos were a powerful tool ONCE...now they are just a part of the landscape. I mean, Thriller was selling adequately for Michael Jackson when it first came out: Epic threatened to withhold all their artists if MTV didn't show the "Thriller" video, so they played it.  The next week, the album (which had already been getting air-play nationwide) sold 800,000 albums.  Groups like Hall and Oates, who had been getting national airplay for over a decade, suddenly found their careers skyrocketing with their MTV exposure.  I think the truth may lie in the middle, though.  Being a national shared experience is a part of it, and the videos themselves were a part of it.   Showing Videos is still commercially viable.  Fuse shows that, and MTV2 used to.  But Viacom realizes that it can make more money with it's own cheap programming than with the 'radio station' concept it used to use.  It's not that showing videos isn't economically viable...it's that selling 'Newlywed' t-shirts is more profitable.And at the risk of sounding like an old fart, I think part of the reason is that the videos are mostly totally derivative, now.  In the early 80s, you had stuff like Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart" and "Leave it", Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded me with Science", any video from Duran Duran's "Rio" album, Golden Earing's "Twilight Zone", Genesis "Illegal Alien", Mike and the Mechanics "All I need is a miracle", David Lee Roth's "California Girls", anything by Peter Gabriel and so on.  Many of the videos since the 80s come across as 'contractual obligation video #3'....usually where the director has figured out some new visual gimmick to use while the band plays what is, essentially, an uninspired concert clip.  Occasionally, this is interesting, like in the White Stripes' "Lego" video.  All too often, it's just bad...as in the case of most rap videos, which are usually the singer walking through a crowded room with girls in bikins hanging off of him in full bling mode (Outkast excepted, of course).</blockquote>

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