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It's not all about the sound

You know the phenomenon, everytime you hear music playing in the background you think about the clip associated to the song.

Many years ago, music was just about sounds. Skilled people with beautiful, at times selfmade, instruments entertained other people. Back then, music was a gift.

But with the introduction of MTV and various other tv-broadcasters, clips are now a must for artists. If you don't have an attractive, high-tech clip you know you'll fail on the billboards. People associate these clips to the quality of the music. If the clip they see is bad they'll stop listening to the song and turn off the screen.

Sexy girls dancing with little clothes on, rappers acting tough, ..It's all been done before. Artists now look for computerized video images, with special effects which match with the sound they produced. It sweeps the watcher along for about 3 minutes, enough time to hear the song and perhaps like it.

Music needs the images, but needless to say the images definitely need the music. You could even say that music videos are a modern version of opera. In an opera, you have music and acting together as a package. It tells us a story, just like most music videos do. As we all are curious at times, people tend to like stories. Makers of music videos know this and try to make a story with their music videos.

The story symbolizes the music: if a song sounds sad, the story will not be a happy tale.

In the future, artists will have to keep on spending much time in developing their attractive clips, perhaps even more time than they dedicate to producing music.

So I'll give you a good tip: don't always see the music, hear it..