Firths Theory

Firth believes that a music video can be broken down into 3 main typologies. Narrative, Performance and Conceptual.

Narrative

The narrative usually seen within a music video is linear and involves some form of story, commonly about love. All videos are based around a story in some way, it could be the relationship between the song and lyrics, videos usually use feelings or emotions found within the song. Narrative is extremely popular within most genre's, most notably Indie, Pop and R&B.

Performance

Performance is used in music videos to give viewers the feeling of being at a concert or seeing the artist live. Music videos can be extremely helpful to an artist, if the performance is seen as exciting and appealing it has the potential to increase ticket sales. Performance visuals that depict how a band behaves and performs both on and off stage are very important as it becomes a sellable image to fans and audiences. There are a variety of example for this type of video such as Guns N' Roses Welcome to the Jungle, Def Leppard Pour Some Sugar On Me and more modern videos from the likes of Ed Sheeran using real concert material as well as many more.

Conceptual

Concept videos can offer a lot to an audience or a fan, they contain various meanings and can be interpreted in different ways. The visuals within the song may not relate to the actual lyrics of the song at all.

It is important to understand these different types of approach to a music video, each type portrays the image and the content the artist wants to put out to entertain fans and attract new audience members and can also be used to send out both direct and indirect messages. Understanding this will be useful when it comes to decided whats best to include in our own music videos and what approach is best for us to take when deciding on a video.