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Genre

It's important to have an understanding of genre and its impact on how a media product is marketed before me and my team mates go on to choose a genre for our music video.

Genre is the categorisation of  media products based on their style and certain characteristics, paradigms, which fall under themes, iconography and structure. Unlike other media products, music video genres are characterised by the genre of the music, the music video is based on and will often follow the characteristics that have long come to be associated with these genres. An apt example of this is an artist wearing chains and dark clothes in a rap music video. A rap music video is also likely to be very performance heavy.

Genre helps discern different sorts of media texts from a vast variety of products. This way the audience can easily choose what sort of music video they want to consume, creating a niche market which the producers then target.

The audience benefits from genres since a sense of familiarity and hence comfort is created when something similar is viewed over and over. The audience derives pleasure from recognising certain elements, being able to relate to the media text and the potential idolisation of said text. In music videos, these elements can be associated with certain artists (artists usually stick to one or two broad genres) or genres as a whole. It's a win-win scenario. If the genre fulfils the expectations of the audience, the audience is gratified. If it doesn't, however, the audience is pleasantly surprised and likely to dub the product as 'refreshing'. In fact this has developed into an entire style called 'allusionism'. The audience also comes together to form communities on internet forums to celebrate and make the process of exchange of media products of the same genre easy.

Producers also benefit as it helps them market their media products efficiently since a distinct target market emerges. This also standardises production, making the production comparatively less expensive and allows creators to take certain artistic and creative liberties.

The pros are always accompanied by the cons. Similarly, music video genres much like genres of all other media products are criticised for creating redundancy and predictability in products e.g almost all pop music videos will have a bright dance sequence. Theorists believe that the audience is not a passive body and therefore needs to be catered to more specifically rather than in broad general categories which are deemed inadequate due to the large overlap in most genres.

We, however, have seen some great adaptions and genres constantly innovating and reinventing itself, keeping its following hooked. Most music genres, which is the basis of music video genres, sound very different now from the time they were first discovered and named.


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