Purpose of Music Video in the Digital Age

With music being a product, the purpose of a music video is to sell it along with promoting merchandise, maybe an upcoming film, the album its attached to or upcoming tour of the artist.

The music video is a form of promotion as the song is the product and not the video itself which often takes longer to produce than the actual song. 

Before the digital age, songs were shown at specific times and places such as TV shows like Top of the Pops. With the development of new technologies, music videos became much widely available removing the need for said programs as they could be accessed on mobile devices. 

The new era proved problematic for the music industry as people were less inclined to purchase the music and more likely to download it from the third party viewing application such as YouTube. Most record companies have controlling conditions about the release and distribution of the music through these third parties.

Copyright infringement is currently a big problem on these sites as there is a struggle between original content creators that use sound clips or video clips that belong to some one else and music labels such as Sony.