Music Video and New Logic of Media Ecology: Extending the Format Toward the Visual Album

Abstract

After the global crisis of the recording industry, popular music has had to rethink itself to avoid perishing. Its alliance with transmedia business and—narrative—logic has been part of that transformation. Music video remains necessary for the multilateral and transmedia music promotion. Through these formats, users create and share content concerning the artist’s visual universe, making it viral and results exponentially. This supposes the first form of expansion of music video in its transformation into the logic of digital ecology in a post-television era. However, the music video has another aspect of growth with its extension through the visual album where each music track corresponds with a visual track; it uses mechanisms that unify the messages or references, for example, as repetitive visual motifs (thematic motifs, similar images, locations, or characters). The visual album allows another way of promoting record works: before, they were sold through two/three singles; now, an attempt is made to extend the life span of records, generating consolidated worlds of meaning. This imaginary is achieved with unity and diversity through rhetorical figures of repetition or quotes from other cultural texts, composing storytelling for music personae. Projects such as Beyoncé’s three visual albums (Beyoncé, 2013; Lemonade, 2016, and Black is King, 2020), Dirty Computer by Janelle Monaé, and El mal querer by Rosalía are examples of a new form of music albums, where the musical artist is resignified with these resources for a new concept of body and performance.