I guess what I’m asking is: is the music video still a major part of marketing a song? I remember when MTV started up, everyone knew the video to a song and getting your video on MTV was a large part of getting it to sell Is this still the case?
Yes.
thanks
MTV doesn’t play videos anymore, neither does their dedicated music video channel M2, or their other music channel VH1. I don’t really get the point of a band making a video anymore, really.
There were videos before MTV and there will be videos after MTV.
As ultrafilter pointed out, there are tons of music videos on YouTube. That is where you go to watch videos these days - not video music channels.
IIRC The Beatles were one of the first bands to make videos. They couldn’t keep up with the traveling demands of all these television shows that wanted them to come perform on the show, so they made videos (I believe their first was “Strawberry Fields”) to be sent out in stead of the band going out. They still got their exposure and it kept them from having to stretch themselves too thin. They did this way before there was any sort of MTV.
Music videos are still a very important part of selling music, I believe.
Time-Warner Cable in Austin airs an Austin-centric channel with programming dominated by music videos. The type of music one will hear on there is more like what one would hear at an indie venue, on Austin City Limits, or an adult album alternative FM station; no rap, dance, metal, or anything else that may be on the popular music charts.
Now you’re going to get people mentioning “music videos” going back to the 1920s (Vitaphone shorts), the 1950s (Scopitone), Bob Dylan (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”) and other Boomer fodder, and Night Flight (Music on TV before MTV). The music video, like sex, has been independently reinvented by just about every generation. 
History is bunk, and the history of technology doubly so: For every invention, someone redefines a term and all of a sudden it was invented earlier. (Ask me how radio worked in Classical Antiquity.)
I still like watching music videos but as pointed out above, either on youtube or somewhere else on the internet rather than on a music video channel on TV. I loved the video for Pussycat Dolls and Timbaland’s “Wait a Minute”. Damn those girls are smokin’.
Okay, “How did radio work in classical antiquity?”
Well, since radio is modulating photons to convey information over a distance, radio in Classical Antiquity was the heliograph (using mirrors to selectively reflect sunlight or firelight).
Hey, I told you it would involve redefining at least one of the terms. I’ve been involved in debates with someone who thinks ‘personal computing’ was invented by IBM in the 1960s when they put CP/CMS on System/360 mainframes. (Each person got their own instance of CMS running on the shared mainframe. That only qualifies as ‘personal’ if you redefine that word into a fine pulp.)
Not really answering your question, but I only watch videos on VH1; not current ones, but their 80s segments and 120 Minutes on Sunday nights (old alternative videos from late 80s/early 90s.)
They seem to play them in the mornings as I’m getting ready to go to work. VH1 shows “Jump Start” from 5 - 11am. After that it’s all reality shows until 4am.
And there are always videos playing on my gyms tvs through their internal network.
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t recall any particularly groundbreaking or interesting videos lately. Yeah, Britney’s latest video is pretty hot, with her being naked and all and having lost all that weight. And Kanye West put’s out some pretty interesting videos (like the the Evil Kineval themed ‘Touch the Sky’ and the Akira influenced ‘Stronger’ with Daft Punk), but I miss the days of Spike Jonze videos.