The big-budget music video is back – but is anybody watching?

Charlie XCX and Billie Eilish in the music video for the hit song Guess. Photo / @charli_xcx

Watching pop phenomenon Sabrina Carpenter and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice actor Jenna Ortega devise ever-more violent ways to murder each other in a parody of 1992 film Death Becomes Her might not be everyone’s cup of tea. Nor might watching Bishop’s Stortford’s Brat superstar Charli XCX and Billie Eilish climb to the summit of a 20-foot-high pile of knickers. Meanwhile, the sight of singer Katy Perry clinging to the side of a helicopter as a bikini-clad cyborg may leave some viewers scratching their heads. But all three scenarios became huge talking points in recent months thanks to the return of the blockbuster music video.

The format’s renaissance – helped by the aforementioned videos for Taste, Guess and Women’s World respectively – has been quite stunning. Music videos seemed to almost disappear somewhere between the decline of linear television music programmes such as Top of the Pops in the mid-Noughties and the mainstream adoption of smartphones in the early 2010s. The growth of YouTube heralded the first wave of the current revival, with videos for songs like Ed Sheeran’s 2017 hit Shape of You and Dua Lipa’s 2017 hit New Rules garnering 6.3 billion and three billion views respectively. But pop fans’ recent ballooning use of so-called “short-form” video-sharing apps such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat has given the format a new boost.

And it has coincided with a new appreciation for cinematic, expensive, agenda-setting, full-length music videos. Budgets are soaring and stardust is back. After the dry ice, shoulder pads and clifftop guitar solos of music videos’ 1980s-to-1990s peak, and the phenomenal viewing figures of the 2010s, are we on the cusp of a new golden age?

“In the years after the pandemic – 2020 to 2022 – there were definitely questions around the value of music videos,” says Austin Daboh, executive vice president of Atlantic Records UK, home to Charli XCX, Fred Again.. and Sheeran. While some video budgets remain low, Daboh has “definitely noticed a revival of bigger-budget, high-impact music videos. There were some quarters that said the blockbuster music video was dead. What we’re seeing with Sabrina and Charli, and what we’ve had with Ed, is that the blockbuster music video is still very much alive and well.”

Henry Scholfield directed Lipa’s New Rules as well as videos for Stormzy and Sheeran. He says that artists and record labels became “less interested in making a visual stand” for a while. “But in the last few years videos have become a way of making a second impact. The music always leads. But finding a visual that can enhance the music has started to become important again,” Scholfield explains.

The reason for the resurgence is simple: technology. Gen Z and Millennial music fans live in a pick-and-mix culture based around their smartphones: 15- to 24-year-olds spend an average of 4.5 hours online each day, with most regularly flitting between six social media platforms, according to Ofcom. And what is a smartphone if it isn’t a TV in your pocket? “Virality” and “reach” have become music industry watchwords.

The aim is to get as many people to view all or some of your video as quickly as possible. And not only view it – like, share or use it to soundtrack their own videos to boot. In this fractured world, a video is rarely viewed all at once on one platform.

“Rather than rushing to one place to watch the whole three minutes, [people will watch] six seconds on X, 30 seconds on TikTok, 40 seconds on Instagram,” says Daboh. Pop stars need to own this multiplatform minestrone with arresting videos. While overall viewing figures may be down from New Rules-type levels, the way people consume videos these days are proliferating in unprecedented ways.

Sabrina Carpenter’s recent statistics illustrate how the new ecosystem works. The 25-year-old American singer and former Disney Channel child actress has released three huge videos since April: Espresso, Please Please Please and Taste. Together, the videos have been watched 350 million times on YouTube while the songs have been used – or the videos mimicked – in almost five million TikTok videos which themselves have been watched over five billion times, according to Chartmetric.

There are extras too. “Reaction videos”, in which fans film themselves reacting to a new video and post it, are a big thing. Meanwhile, a six-second outtake clip of a blood-soaked Carpenter standing next to a chainsaw-wielding Ortega during the Taste shoot – accompanied by a snippet of Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer ­– has been liked 23.5 million times on TikTok. That’s almost the equivalent of the entire population of Australia – for a snippet. By way of comparison, the most popular music video in the medium’s nadir year of 2007, Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend, mustered just 68 million global views in 12 months.

Due to pick-and-mix viewing habits, many artists today release so-called “music visualisers”, which are low-cost and shorter versions of actual videos. Visualisers are essentially clips of the song: they are easily sharable and “like”-able on apps like TikTok. But even clip culture is changing, and this is where people are getting really excited. In 2022 TikTok tripled the maximum length of videos people can upload to 10 minutes, meaning entire videos could be uploaded and viewed. A music industry insider says this is also behind the current resurgence. And in its wake, “TV-level production money” is being splashed on videos. Perhaps the industry is taking its cues from South Korean pop music: K-pop artists have always done big-budget videos and never stopped.

It’s a long way from the early 1980s when the fledgling music video industry was making it up as it went along following the arrival of US cable channel MTV. Former 10cc member Kevin Godley formed the trailblazing Godley & Creme video directing unit with bandmate Lol Creme. Together they made era-defining videos for Duran Duran (Girls on Film), The Police (Every Breath You Take) and Frankie Goes to Hollywood (Two Tribes). Godley says the alliance of music and image has always existed.

“Can you think of Elvis Presley without thinking of what he looked like or how he moved? It’s all tied together. It’s just that there was no infrastructure to support what it eventually became,” he tells me.

The first ever custom-shot music video pre-dates MTV by some decades – it was probably (debate rages online) The Moody Blues’ Go Now in 1964. Its innovative use of lighting foreshadowed Queen’s famous Bohemian Rhapsody video of a decade later. The Beatles started making promotional videos in 1965 for tracks including I Feel Fine and Day Tripper, while David Bowie pioneered the format over the next 15 years (his video for 1980 single Ashes to Ashes was the first that cost more than $500,000).

But music videos were turbocharged by the arrival of dedicated music television. The first video shown on MTV in August 1981 was – appropriately – Video Killed the Radio Star by English band the Buggles. Yet even in those early MTV days there “wasn’t an industry – everyone was flapping around having a good time because the labels didn’t really know what a video was or the value of a video,” Godley says. Steve Barron’s CV as a director includes Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean and A-ha’s seminal “cartoon comes to life” video for Take On Me (two billion YouTube views). He says in the early days he’d get sent a simple audio cassette containing just a song – with no artwork or lyrics – and he’d work up his treatment from there.

“We slowly made up our own rules,” Barron says. His sent his initial ideas for Billie Jean to Jackson on a one-page fax, following a briefing by the singer’s manager. Jackson “really liked” his idea of a Yellow Brick Road-style light-up dancefloor.

As the 1980s progressed, music videos crystalised into a multimillion-pound industry. MTV ruled the airwaves in the 1980s and 1990s, helping break artists like Madonna, George Michael, Guns N’ Roses and Jackson (although the station initially shunned black artists). Videos arguably reached their zenith in 1995 when Jackson and his sister Janet made the most expensive music video of all time: Scream cost US$7 million to make - $11.3m in today’s money. Three decades on, it still holds the record. MTV still exists today but changing viewing habits due to the rise of the internet in the mid-Noughties saw it radically scale back its music content to focus on reality shows instead.

Even at MTV’s peak, though, analogue videos made for analogue TV sets didn’t make money. They were loss-leading adverts for the physical single they were promoting. “You’d lose every penny,” says one label insider. Nowadays, due to video streaming sites, videos can make money. Labels are paid per view on YouTube (a tiny amount) and get a cut of its ad revenue. Videos also include product placements – NYX make-up in a recent Anne Marie video, for example – while computer screens contain hyperlinks to artists’ merch websites. As director Scholfield puts it: “The value of eyeballs has become much greater. Once eyeballs become valuable then you’d better put something in front of them. Art and commerce go hand in hand.” Because of this, the creation of videos is today tackled like a grand corporate project.

Concepts are strategised by artists and labels before a brief is decided, a promotional strategy is war-gamed and up to 10 directors are invited to pitch for the work. One average-sized label I know made 40 music videos last year, with a budget of up to £1 million ($2.1m) per video for its superstar artists. Budgets have doubled over the last five years as the revival has gathered pace, Scholfield says, although the average for a big artist remains around £350,000. One artist who has deployed a faultless strategy is Charli XCX, who arguably owned the summer with Carpenter.

Not only did Charli XCX’s Brat album spawn its own term (being labelled “brat” became a nonconformist’s badge of honour) and its own colour (sludgy Brat green is everywhere) but it spawned the Guess video, which has been viewed 30 million times on YouTube since August and gained the 32-year-old 200,000 new TikTok followers. Total views on her YouTube channel have now surpassed 1.55 billion, says Chartmetric. Central to the video’s appeal is the appearance of Eilish, a global superstar in her own right.

“There’s an element of virality that’s beyond comprehension,” says Daboh from Atlantic, Charli’s label. “And if we understood virality 100 per cent then everyone would go viral all of the time. Usually on a campaign you might have one moment that goes super-viral and captures the zeitgeist and the public’s imagination. Big up to Charli who’s had several over this campaign. She literally owned a colour … ”

The inclusion of Eilish in Guess highlights another huge trend in videos: guest stars. As well as Carpenter starring with Hollywood A-lister Ortega in Taste (Ortega herself has 38 million Instagram followers), she teamed up with her real-life boyfriend, Oscar-nominated actor Barry Keoghan, in her Please Please Please video. Playing a “hot felon”, Saltburn star Keoghan attracted a whole new cohort of viewers to Carpenter’s video.

Even badly-received videos start cultural conversations these days, something that could not be said 20 years ago. Perry’s video for Women’s World was slated for showing women carrying out a series of jobs associated with masculinity (construction work, for example). Rather than promote feminism, it was slammed for catering to the male gaze. “Satire,” cried Perry. Hmm. But the video provoked widespread debate.

The return of the big video is a boon for the creative industry in other ways: videos have always been petri dishes of innovation.

“There was hardly a successful video that didn’t spawn at least one, and usually two, commercials,” says Barron. The rotoscope animation of his Take On Me video, for example, was later used in a Volkswagen TV advert (Barron writes about his career in his book Egg n Chips & Billie Jean).

Meanwhile, Godley came up with plenty of his video effects by, as he puts it, “pressing buttons we shouldn’t have” in an editing suite. The “merging face” concept of Godley & Creme’s seminal 1985 video for their song Cry was arrived at by using a fading technique called a “soft wipe” usually used for TV titles. Jackson borrowed the concept for his 1991 video for Black or White. The trickle-up effect of music videos should not be underestimated.

There’s an outlier here. Beyoncé, who pioneered the “visual album” with Lemonade in 2016, recently said that she has stopped making videos as she didn’t want them to distract from her music. She said that fans at her concerts “became the visual”. One music industry insider suggests finances may be the cause: if Beyoncé can make more money from touring than videos, why would she put out videos at all? Surely it’s better to stoke demand for her concert tickets by staying away from the limelight. But Beyoncé is in the minority. Even Taylor Swift continues to make videos, and her Eras tour has grossed a billion dollars.

So the big video is here to stay. Daboh even believes that the next generation of festival headliners could break through via this medium. “Charli XCX arrived as a global star in the Guess video and I think over the next couple of years you’ll see more global stars arrive off the back of their music videos.”

A new golden age is approaching. Get the popcorn ready.