Abstract:

Following its inception as a promotional form in the early-mid 1970s, music video has become an internationally produced and circulated form that is part of a multi-facetted audio-visual media environment alongside related forms such TV advertisements, corporate promo features, television programs, feature films, video games and internet media. While it overlaps with other forms, it also comprises a distinct media area with its own genealogies, genres, fashions and (most appropriately for the focus of this article) local inflections of these. While the majority of analyses of music video production sectors, styles and/or auteurs have focused on North American and/or Western European production; analysis of other industrial contexts provides significant insights into local engagements with the form and of its realisation within particular commercial, stylistic and technological spaces. Study of the development of music video in Melanesia is particularly illuminating since it reveals diverse and differential patterns of development at one of the furthest removes from the centre of the Western music industry and its product dispersion apparatus.

Author: Phil Hayward