Probably a topic for another thread, but what purpose do music videos serve in this modern age? It's not the 80s anymore. MTV is dead.
Good promotion. Considering how big YT is now, a video can do more than just the song played over a blank screen.
Yeah, and some people (mainly the mainstream) are still very video-driven. They like watching stuff while listening to music.
True, and for some of those artists, mainstream or not, music videos can be used as an outlet for artistic expression in ways that music alone cannot produce. One of my favorite music videos of recent years has to be Justin Timberlake's video for his 8-minute song "Mirrors", and while the song itself is pretty amazing already, the video just adds so much to the piece, fleshing out the song's lyrics with on-screen characters, as well as a trippy dance in a house of mirrors in the second half of the video/song.
For many rock musicians and bands, where the focus is more on the instrumentation and instrumentalists themselves, music videos are more about capturing their performance, but for others, especially mainstream artists, it's a chance to express their non-musical ideas in a way that breathes life into their music.
-Marc.