Music Video Conventions

The conventions of a music video are what features in all style of video. The main purpose of a music video is to promote the artist and song as well as portraying a certain message in the video for the audience to relate to. The theorist that relates to this idea is Richard Dyer, who suggests the theory of representation and proposed that media texts represent themselves to society and an audience. He said "how we are seen determines how we are treated, how we treat others is based on how we see them and how we see them comes from representation." This means the music video encodes a certain message through conventions and the audience decode the message, in a way that represents itself to them as an individual meaning. 
There are 3 video styles, devised by the theorist, Andrew Goodwin. These include narrative, performance and abstract. There are conventional video styles to different genres, for example pop music videos often follow the performance and narrative video style, whereas indie rock videos tend to be abstract, reflecting the music atmosphere through the genre. The music genre often has it's secondary conventions which suggest to an audience what music genre it is as soon as it is watched. These conventions make each video different, with the use of different mise-en-scene and editing, with particular conventions for each music genre.

The conventions of music videos following a narrative theme show different techniques within cinematogrpahy, mise-en-scene, editing and sound.
The conventions for cinematography often use long shots, establishing the area and key characters used in a narrative to portray a realistic story through the video. Many close ups of key parts and expressions that help develop the narrative and high and low angled shots, looking up or down at areas in a music video are used to convey a convincing story, outlining a meaning or message behind the music video, relating it to the song. Pans and tracks are also often used in videos, following the characters and artist as well as getting a full view of key areas and scenes in the narrative. Each conventional technique used within cinematography suggests to the audience what music genre the video is.