MTV launched in 1981 with the tagline "You'll never look at music the same way again," and it was true. To say that the music video revolutionized music is an understatement. Music videos allowed artists to visually express themselves and add more meaning to their records than they could have before. Although MTV began with a 24/7 all music video format, it eventually moved away from that until even short clips of videos were far and few between. The end of an era, symbolically at least, came on Valentine's Day 2005. That was the day the domain name www.youtube.com was activated.
YouTube made the original purpose of MTV irrelevant. There was no need to sit through videos you didn't care about while you waited for the ones you wanted to see. There was no need to wait for a record label let Yahoo! music videos put their video online. YouTube idealized the wild untamed frontier of the Internet. It also represented the continued fragmentation of pop culture. In late 1983, Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video was inescapable. If you turned on MTV for any length of time, you'd end up seeing it. That's the kind of pop cultural homogeneity you get when there is only one place to watch music videos. In the Internet age, it takes a lot more work to pull it off.
One of the first groups to show the world how it was done was OK Go. It was summer 2006 when the band released their choreographed treadmill dance video for "Here It Goes Again". The video was shot in one continuous take and cost only five dollars to make. The video is interesting and humorous and it's no surprise that it quickly went viral. The clip racked up millions of views on Youtube and the band scored its first and only Hot 100 hit.
It wasn't until fall 2008 that a major pop star capitalized on what OK Go had taught the industry, and even then, it was an accident. Beyonce was preparing for the release of her third solo album, I Am...Sasha Fierce. To launch the campaign, two singles would be released simultaneously, the ballad "If I Were A Boy" and the dancefloor filler "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)".
