Music videos promote popular artists in cultural forms that circulate widely across social media networks. With the advent of YouTube in 2005 and the proliferation of handheld technologies and social networking sites, the music video has become available to millions worldwide, and continues to serve as a fertile platform for the debate of issues and themes in popular culture. This volume of essays serves as a foundational handbook for the study and interpretation of the popular music video, with the specific aim of examining the industry contexts, cultural concepts, and aesthetic materials that videos rely upon in order to be both intelligible and meaningful. Easily accessible to viewers in everyday life, music videos offer profound cultural interventions and negotiations while traversing a range of media forms. From a variety of unique perspectives, the contributors to this volume undertake discussions that open up new avenues for exploring the creative changes and developments in music video production. With chapters that address music video authorship, distribution, cultural representations, mediations, aesthetics, and discourses, this study signals a major initiative to provide a deeper understanding of the intersecting and interdisciplinary approaches that are invoked in the analysis of this popular and influential musical form.

Lori Burns is Professor of Music at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her book Disruptive Divas: Critical and Analytical Essays on Feminism, Identity, and Popular Music (2002) won the Pauline Alderman Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music (2005). She was a founding co-editor of the Tracking Pop Series of the University of Michigan Press and is now serving as co-editor for the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series.

Stan Hawkins is Professor of Musicology at the University of Oslo, Norway, and Professor in Popular Music at the University of Agder, Norway. He is author of numerous books, including Settling the Pop Score (2002), The British Pop Dandy (2009), Prince: The Making of a Pop Music Phenomenon (co-author Sarah Niblock, 2011), and Queerness in Pop (2016).