Video killed the radio star, as the first music video to ever air on MTV explained, and now TikTok and streaming services have killed the music video. For the time being, at least.

To be clear, music videos are not exactly dead. The vast majority of hit singles in 2024 still come with them. They circulate on TikTok in 15-second snippets, and some are even shared so widely they become communal timestamps of a moment—your “WAP”s, “Montero”s, and “Espresso”s. These moments are few and fleeting, though, compared to the music video heyday of the 1990s. It’s now common for a song like Miley Cyrus’s 2023 hit “Flowers” to rack up 1.8 billion Spotify streams compared with 720 million YouTube views in the same year. Songs now tend to find fans through so many other means that official music videos too often come across like low-level line items on the album cycle checklist. Just one more prong in the PR strategy. But perhaps the time is right for them to become more than afterthoughts once again. Maybe a generation of music fans is ready for the video to make a cultural comeback—whether they realize it or not.

“It’s such a profound experience to discover a song through a music video, instead of hearing it on Spotify,” says Eric Weiner, founder of music-centric creative agency The Wild Honey Pie, which produces videos and experiences for such artists as Iron and Wine, Mckenna Grace, and Twin Shadow. “The connection you have with that artist, their music, and their personality is just a totally different beast when there’s a visual component that has a style and a story.”

At their best, music videos are a collision of art and commerce that inextricably link sight and sound in the minds of the masses. Close your eyes and think of Beyoncé, and perhaps you’ll conjure her in a mustard-colored Cavalli gown laying waste to a car with a baseball bat. Or perched atop a sinking cop car. Or doing the “Single Ladies” dance in crisp black and white. Beyoncé’s career began during an era when music videos were indispensable tools for turning artists into icons, and it shows. According to Weiner, that era might not just be the industry’s past but also its future.

What music videos were

It would be hard to convey to a current college student the extent to which music videos dominated culture in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The very idea of MTV sounds quaint now: teenagers glued to a couch for hours, talking over an unending, if commercially interrupted parade of the day’s biggest video hits. That was how ‘90s kids learned that Christopher Walken was an excellent dancer, or that Madonna had entered her S&M era or the power of fish-eye lenses. Millions tuned in daily, monitoring fluctuations in popularity rankings amid fierce new competition, cultivating hard opinions about who would clean up at the Video Music Awards. It’s probably not a coincidence that CD sales peaked in 2000, with $13.2 billion in sales.

Teenagers weren’t the only ones watching music videos back then either. Enough adults paid attention that Hollywood had no choice but to do so as well. Directors including David Fincher, F. Gary Gray, and Spike Jonze cut their teeth in the music video trenches, and then soared to successful film careers, while Alicia Silverstone had the same trajectory on the acting side. The music video-to-mainstream-fame pipeline was wide open. Until it wasn’t.

It’s unclear exactly when music videos lost their mojo. It certainly didn’t happen overnight. The decline began at some point after the sky-high ratings of the 2001 VMAs, the broadcast where Britney Spears performed with a seven-foot albino Burmese python draped across her shoulders. In the years that followed, the music industry struggled with flatlining CD sales amid the new reality of file-sharing services like Napster. The less money record labels had to throw around, the less they spent on music videos; meanwhile, the more songs fans could discover on streaming services like Pandora, the less use they had for those videos.

MTV had been terraforming the reality TV space since The Real World debuted in 1992 and gradually began devoting more resources that way than toward music-video programming. According to Weiner, the network lost its relevance somewhere around 2008, when it canceled its flagship video countdown show Total Request Live. He should know, too, having worked as a music coordinator at MTV from 2011 to 2013, selecting and licensing songs for various shows.

“MTV failed to innovate,” Weiner says. “They struck gold with reality TV and didn’t think to create a music-streaming or music-video platform online. By the time they tried, it was too late.” This, despite a separate push to promote artists via a proprietary MySpace-esque platform.

What music videos are

Anyone in desperate want of an old-school MTV experience today can still find it. They just wouldn’t come across it anywhere obvious. Instead, they’d have to seek out the Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television station Pluto TV, which offers Viacom channels like MTV Spankin’ New and MTV Biggest Pop Hits. These deliver passable facsimiles of that long-gone MTV flavor. For the most part, how it works now is that artists upload perfunctory music videos to YouTube, share them through social media and what remains of the music blogosphere, and pray that fickle fans will find them worth sharing further.

YouTube hosts millions of music videos, with over 900,000 from the major-label partnership platform VEVO alone, but its curation is too chaotic. The videos are often grouped in either user-generated or algorithmically assigned playlists, though there is a handy Top Music Videos chart within YouTube Music’s Explore tab. Neither Apple Music or Spotify, the top digital service providers, have prioritized videos near this level. Spotify only started rolling out music video functionality back in March, beginning with the UK, and Apple Music’s respectable amount of video content can only be found by scrolling down to the bottom of the Browse page or on Apple Music TV, where its curated playlists live. (“We’re excited by how users are embracing video on Spotify and we’ll continue to innovate and expand the catalog to more people worldwide,” a spokesperson for the company said in a statement. Representatives from Apple Music did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

“These apps are offering passive experiences. You put on a song and you put your phone away, then Spotify or Apple Music takes care of the rest,” Weiner says. “But they don’t want passive users, they want active users, and better-curated music video playlists would keep people stuck to their screens.”

The main app that people turn to for active music appreciation now is TikTok. According to industry reports, 85% of TikToks contain music and 75% of the platform’s users discover new music while swiping through it. A viral TikTok can lead to a dramatic sales spike, too, as when Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” got a 374% boost after a 2020 video made the rounds. Music seems to mostly spread on TikTok, though, not with clips from videos but through memes, challenges, or dances—micro-trends with minuscule shelf lives. Because it’s designed for short attention spans, success on TikTok can come and go just as quickly. Weiner recalls an artist he worked with hitting three million monthly listeners after a successful stretch on TikTok, only to shrink to about a tenth as many within six months, after that first wave of fans moved on.

Perhaps the path to sustainability involves a more antiquated form of exposure: making an identity-cementing first impression with a killer music video that airs someplace where people will definitely see it and leaves ‘em wanting more.

What music videos could be

One step that might help with a music video comeback is better funding. Record labels have been spending less and less on videos as the streaming era evolves. According to Weiner, labels often approach The Wild Honey Pie to make videos with a $5,000 budget. Now, it’s certainly possible to make a great video in that price range—the infamous OK Go treadmill-dance video cost just $5,000 in 2006, for instance—but it’s constraining. This is where brands could step in.

Music videos are ideal vessels for low-key brand partnerships. They don’t have to feel like crass commercials either, or like having commercials play on a giant screen behind the artist during their live shows. Once they became known for their creative music videos, OK Go figured out some crafty ways to forge sponsorship deals without making them blatant. The band’s incredible Rube Goldberg Machine video, “This Too Shall Pass,” which frontman Damian Kulash codirected, is quietly sponsored by State Farm Insurance. In contrast, their zero-gravity video, “Upside Down & Inside Out,” which he also codirected, was shot in a special aircraft most viewers would not know was provided by Russia’s S7 Airlines. Any popular artist ignoring this option is leaving video-funding money on the table.

“It’s like another art form itself, figuring out how to integrate branding into music videos without being gross,” says Weiner, who has worked with brands like Topo Chico on music videos. “I think brands understand the cachet of being connected to consumers through things that people actually care about, and that supporting the arts is good for the bottom line.”

But some promising artists have no trouble funding their music videos; they just need better curation to get eyeballs on them. As Weiner sees it, the major digital service providers could bring in the remaining fulcrums of music journalism for this aspect of the business. He sees in Apple Music and Spotify a new opportunity for music blogs like Pitchfork and Stereogum to connect music fans with their new favorite artists—and to improve curation in other ways.

“For Spotify to not have a music video playlist from [influential playlist-maker] RapCaviar, and no music video component to [weekly personalized playlist] Release Radar is wild,” he says.

At a minimum, Apple Music and Spotify could stand to add on to their platforms a well-advertised, easily accessible chart of the top-ranked music videos at any given time. It would be a way of announcing through their loudest megaphone all the undiscovered music videos at each user’s fingertips. Sometimes people just don’t know what they want until they know it exists.

Even if it’s something that’s existed for more than 40 years.