re: What happened to music videos?

They have become every bit as creative,imaginative, and innovative as the music they promote, or the music business in general for that matter

Typically, when a major label or well-funded indie band has a new song, they release 4 videos (usually releasing one every 2 weeks before moving on to the next song):
1. an animated lyric video
2. a story driven traditional music video
3. a live performance video
4. a remix or acoustic version

A lot of bands like to release live studio sessions as that number 3 version. Heck, I've done that. It's a relatively inexpensive way to generate quality content that typically does well on Youtube. It took me over $1600 and a lot of bootstrapping to make a quality story-driven music video. It took only a couple hundred to make a pretty good live performance one.

There have been some solid country videos the past 10-15 years


And I dont particularly like country other than coastal music