ABSTRACT
Musicians’ financial incentives for making videos have also done a 180. With artists earning per-click royalties on YouTube—not to mention revenue through product placements—music videos are no longer advertisements for physical media to be sold. Music videos and live performances have become the vehicles through which artists make money, with royalties from audio-only plays paling in comparison. With few networks playing music videos on harder-to-access cable stations, music videos sagged in cultural relevance in the mid-2000s. It was actually a few years after YouTube was released that music videos became popular on the network—largely due to bandwidth constraints. It’s hard to overstate the sea change in music videos brought about by the migration from cable networks to YouTube. Perhaps the most important change is the removal of the parallel functions of gatekeeper and tastemaker that cable networks had been playing in the distribution of videos. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
