… I think not.
Watching MTV this afternoon a clip came on by Daft Funk (I think.. or is it Daft Punk?) called Around the World (I think.. that’s the phrase repeated throughout the song so I can only presume). As my mother walked through the loungeroom I mentioned I thought it was a good song and she said that without the video it’d be boring. I disagreed.. although I admit it’s a simple tune it is dance-able or could be used as a nice bit of background music.
The downside of video is that it’s not easily portable and in this aspect radio, cassettes and CDs win because of their portability. You can listen to CDs in the car while hooning around the countryside, stick a tape in your walkman when you go out for a jog, or have the radio playing softly in the shop to entertain customers.
Video is an enhancement to music. People continue to buy singles and albums, they frequent clubs to dance around, they put on CDs before going to sleep to relax themselves, and radio stations still exist. Video offers a futher medium of exposure similar to radio as well as giving the band an image.
If you took a video clip and spliced it in two – one section being the music, the other being the video – you could still recognise the aural version as being music whereas the visual would most likely be thought to be a film. So the video needs the music in order to be a music clip, but the sound does not need the video to be music.