In 1992, MTV began listing directors with the artist and song credits, reflecting the fact that music videos had increasingly become an auteur's medium. (auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary author). Directors such as Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Stéphane Sednaoui, Mark Romanek and Hype Williams all started off around this time and brought a unique vision and style to the videos they directed. (some went on to direct feature films). Two of Romanek’s directed pieces (both in 1995) are notable for being two of the three most expensive music videos of all time: Michael and Janet Jackson's "Scream", which cost $7 million to produce, and Madonna's "Bedtime Story", which cost $5 million. "Scream" is still the most expensive video of all time. During this era MTV launched channels around the world to show music videos produced in each local market.
Internet era
The earliest users of music videos on the internet were members of IRC-based groups (Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing (online chat) designed for group communication) who recorded them as they appeared on television, then digitised them.
The website iFilm, hosted short videos, including music videos, launched in 1997. (ifilm.com is a U.S.-based video-sharing website on which users can upload, share and view videos)
‘Napster’ ran between 1999 and 2001 and was a peer-to-peer file sharing service which enabled its users to share video files, including those for music videos.
By the mid-2000s, MTV and many of its sister channels had largely abandoned showing music videos in favor of reality television shows, which were more popular with its audiences.
2005 saw the launch of the website YouTube, which made the viewing of online video much faster and easier! (Google Videos, Yahoo! Video, Facebook and MySpace's video functionality, all use similar features)
These websites had a profound effect on the viewing of music videos; some artists began to see success as a result of videos seen mostly or entirely online, helping to broaden the popularity of smaller artists with less money in the budget for mass market promotion.
In 2007, the RIAA (The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trade organization that represents the recording industry distributors in the United States.) issued cease-and-desist (halt activity) letters to YouTube users to prevent single users from sharing videos, which are the property of the music labels. After Youtube merged with Google, they assured the RIAA that they would find a way to pay royalties through a bulk agreement with the major record labels. (royalities are usage-based payments made by one party to another for the right to ongoing use of an asset - license)
Although not all labels share the same policy toward music videos AS some welcome the development and upload music videos to various online outlets themselves, viewing music videos as free advertising for their artists, while other labels view music videos not as an advertisement, but as the product itself.
The Internet has become the primary growth income market for record company-produced music videos. At its launch, Apple's iTunes Store provided a section of free music videos in high quality compression to be watched via the iTunes application. More recently the iTunes Store has begun selling music videos for use on Apple's iPod with video playback capability.
VEVO was launched in Decemeber 2009 and is a music video website set up by several major music publishers. The videos on VEVO are controlled by YouTube, with Google and VEVO sharing the advertising revenue.
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