Categories of Music Videos

There are three different categories of music video. These are narrative, Performance, and conceptual.

Narrative – these tend to follow a storyline that relate to the words of the song, narratives are used in all genres of music and tend to be used more in love songs.

Performance - These are music videos that feature the artist/band/group performing the song through most of the video. These videos often incorporate a lot of close up shots of the artist and their instruments, shown in videos like The Killers – Romeo and Juliet. This also tends to be used more in band and group music videos.

Conceptual – this is seen alot more in modern music videos, it doesn’t really have any relationship to the music or the lyrics and is usually completely random, as seen in Fatboy Slim - Right Here Right Now.

In some music different categories are often incorporated into one video.