Performance, Concept, Narrative

Music videos are often sorted into three main categories - perfomance, concept or narrative.

Performance videos (as the name suggests) often focus on the live performance of the song by the band for a large portion, if not all, of the full length of the video. They are probably the quickest, easiest and, helpfully for indie bands, the cheapest style of music video. This means that many smaller bands will opt for performance videos. Importantly they were probably the most commonly used video styles dating all the way back to when music videos first began. Their key intention is to show the bands skill and the energy that the band has. This can often mean incorporating their target audience in the video in some way. The genre which probably makes the most use of performance video is rock music.

 This is the "clean version" of 2009's Christmas no.1 Killing in the Name by Rage Against The Machine. Their first music video perfectly captures their anger and energy:


Narrative videos feature a storyline - often based on the lyrics of the song or theme of the album. It is quite common for the actual band not to be shown in narrative videos or if they are shown they often have bit parts as actors. In this way music videos act as short films to a certain degree. Their intention this time is to reel the audience in to watching the story develop and finish, therefore actually watching the whole song.

Below is Aerosmith's narrative based video for Cryin':


Concept videos are arguably the most creative style of music video. They don't focus on a particular storyline and instead choose to explore a certain idea or ...concept. Again here the music video acts as a short artistic film intending to intrigue it's audience and grab their attention. This is more likely to be seen in creative genres of music rather than mainstream pop. The possibiltity of great success through viral distribution is quite often seen with this style of video.

A perfect example is New Order's True Faith:


More often than not though, music videos will not simply slot into one of these categories. Hybrid music videos combine aspects of each style - the most commonly seen is performance/narrative videos. Some videos even combine all three categories. As with most things there will always be exceptions to the rules, videos that play on the conventions of their categories, these are just the most commonly seen styles of video.