There used to be a middle tier of music video. Not the enormous productions and not phone footage — a properly crewed shoot, a day or two, a real director, funded by a label as a matter of routine for an artist with some traction.
That tier has largely disappeared, and what has grown in its place is genuinely different rather than simply cheaper.
Why the funding went
The economics that supported it were built around promotion for physical sales, and later for television play.
Music television as a driver of sales largely ended. The promotional function moved online, where the video competes with everything else rather than occupying a scheduled slot.
And the return on a video became much harder to attribute. A video that plays on television reaches a measurable audience at a known time. A video online may accumulate views over years, or not, and its effect on streams of the track is difficult to isolate.
Uncertain return plus fixed cost is a difficult case to make to anybody controlling a budget.
What the money went to instead
Largely to short-form content, in volume.
The calculation is straightforward. A single video costs a certain amount and produces one asset. The same money produces a large number of short pieces, each of which can be tested, and some of which will find an audience.
It is a portfolio approach against a single bet, and given how unpredictable performance is, the portfolio is the rational choice.
What it produces is a lot of material that is promotional rather than authored — clips, snippets, performance fragments, behind the scenes — which serves a different function.
The visualiser
The most visible replacement and worth taking seriously as a form.
A simple looping or slowly evolving image, running for the length of the track, produced cheaply and quickly. Originally a way of satisfying platforms that expect a video for every track.
It has become something more than that. Some are genuinely good — generative work, animation, single beautiful images that reward staring at for four minutes.
And it does something the traditional promo did not, which is get out of the way. A narrative video imposes a reading on a song. A visualiser accompanies it without interpreting it, and for a lot of music that is more appropriate.
The live session revival
The other thing that has grown considerably. A performance, filmed well, in an interesting space, with good audio, often in one take.
These are cheaper than a concept video and produce something with real value. They demonstrate that the artist can play, which recorded music does not, and they age better than anything tied to a visual fashion.
The good ones are technically demanding in a specific way. Multi-camera, live audio recorded properly, a space chosen for acoustics as much as for appearance. It is closer to broadcast work than to film production.
Several of the series doing this have built substantial audiences of their own, independent of any individual artist, which is an interesting inversion.
Self-funded and self-directed
The other significant shift. A lot of artists now make their own videos, or work with a small consistent team over years.
The results are uneven and the best of them are more coherent than the label-funded equivalent was, because the same person is making the music and the images.
The tooling makes this possible in a way it was not. A capable camera, editing software, and a reasonable understanding of what you are doing will produce something that would have required a crew twenty years ago.
What is usually missing is the discipline a producer imposed. Self-directed work tends to run long, indulge ideas that do not land, and lack the outside eye that says a section is not working.
What was actually lost
Being fair about it. The middle tier was a training ground.
Directors, cinematographers, editors and crew learned on music videos, on real budgets, with real professional expectations, on projects short enough to fail without consequence.
An enormous number of feature directors came through that route. It is not obvious what has replaced it as an entry path, and the people I know starting out now have a harder time finding paid work that teaches them anything.
That is the loss that will show up later, in whoever does not get made, and it is difficult to point at because absences are.
Where it seems to be going
Toward a barbell. Very large productions for the small number of artists who justify them, and very cheap self-produced work for everyone else, with little between.
That shape is familiar from other creative industries and it is not encouraging.
The cheap end is more interesting than the equivalent was twenty years ago, which is genuinely something. What it does not do is pay anybody enough to learn on.