The background on music videos.

This quote taken from Wikipedia:
''In 1894 when sheet music publishers still ran the music business, Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hired electrician George Thomas and various performers to promote sales of their song The Little Lost Child. Thomas projected a series of still images on a screen simultaneously with live performances in what became a popular form of entertainment known as the illustrated song. This has been termed the first music video. Even today, many music videos and much contemporary television still use series of still images accompanied by song.''
-Music videos began life as still images to go along with songs in the 1890's, and then developed into animations in the 1920's.

-Visuals developed farther with video recording tchnology in the 50's and 60's.

-the first music 'videos' were nothing more than a single shot in most cases, and often had no story to them, but were just the band or singer performing their song. They often appeared as short sections of a film. The Beatles piloted this idea in their films such as 'a Hard day's night, and 'Yellow submarine'

-As Beatlemania took over the world, they made these short videos in order to communicate with lots of their fans at once rather than performing, and the idea quickly took off.

-David Bowie to name but one artist, took this idea and used it in his 'life on mars' and 'Space Oddity' Videos, both from 1973.
-These videos may have been the height of technology at the time, but compared with today's videos, they are bland and boring due to just being the performer performing.

-In the 80's, music videos became more abstract with new technology, and featured often more than just the artist performing. An example of this is Bowie's 'Ashes to Ashes' video, which while not being overly narrative, has at least some parts in which it differs from performance.

-Gradually over the next decade, Artists started formulating narrative plots and implementing them into their videos. A good example of this is 'One' by Metallica. The backstory uses sections from a film 'Johnny got his gun' to backup up its story.

Nowadays, the majority of videos around are part narrative/abstract and part performance. Many Popular musicians opt for the more abstract as it reflects their approach to making music videos: surface without substance, recycled ideas, and style without meaning.
-these phrases are used as the majority of popular artists are inclined only to make the video look nice, without caring about what ideas it connotes and if there is a substantial plotline.