‪Thirty years after‪ ‪ I wrote the article reproduced elsewhere in this issue of Volume, the videoclip is an elusive entity. In the present moment it has become, it would seem, both ubiquitous and minor. Through the videoclip, YouTube has become the largest disseminator of music in the world, but this has diminished rather than magnified the clip’s status as cultural form. The abundance of clips on Youtube seems a sign of little more than that platform’s uncontrolled voraciousness and role as dumping ground for all kinds of minor cultural forms (from old ‪ ‪films de série B‪ ‪ to computer repair instruction videos.) Here, the artistically ambitious videoclip finds itself lost amidst the static photographs, images of spinning vinyl records or footage of ephemeral live performances that accompany so much of the music that Youtube makes available. Most of the time, one looks for videoclips on Youtube in order to hear a song or initiate a playlist (Manghani, 2017); the clip itself has become little more than the sheathing in which a song is enclosed. ‪
‪Outside of Youtube, the videoclip has come to play a minor role in scenarios for the future development (and revival) of the music industries. Excitement in these industries, over the last decade, has centred on the rise of audio streaming services, like Spotify, Tidal or Apple Music, from which the videoclip has been banished or on which (as with Tidal) it functions as little more than a supplementary feature…