promote music videos are defined as short videos or films that are accompanied by a complete musical piece, generally by a song. A music video (MV) these days is used primarily for marketing purposes. It usually promotes music recordings - the more effective the music video, the higher the sales of these music recordings. The origins of this specific media dates way back but they got highly recognized in the 1980s. MVs got the attention of people when the format of MTVs was based around these music short films. The actual term "music video" became widely used early in the 1980s. Prior to that, such short films were called promotional clips or promotional films.

There are so many ways in which promote music videos can be made. A wide range of film making styles can be employed to do a music video. Some of these film making techniques that are successfully used over the years to produce MVs are live action filming, documentaries, and animation. Even approaches that are not narrative in form are used. One example of this situation is the use of abstract film. Other MVs do not only go for one film making style but try to blend numerous styles together. A common blending that has been used for music video is the live action and animation mix.

The internet is one of the places where music videos are so prolific. In fact, there are already a lot of known situations where a music video becomes viral, spreading all over the world so fast! Not only that, there are also plenty of huge websites built solely for music videos. These websites contain pages and pages of these short musical clips. The short music films available can be those mainstream ones, those of great artists and of great hit songs. Other music films out there are those made by individuals just wanting to share what they can do.

The spread of music videos in the Internet was said to have been started by IRC-based group members. These people recorded the video as they were shown on TV and then converted the recordings to digital files. They then exchange these .mpg files with each other through the IRC channels. The time when broadband internet connection became easily available to almost everyone really expanded the list of things people can do with music videos. Now, music video streaming and downloading are fairly common place.

There are basically two kinds of music videos - official ones and non-official ones. The official ones are those with official labels, copyrights, resale rights, etc. These are those made by recording artists and are part of their records. The non-official music videos are made by fans. These are usually put together by using different photos or video clips and music from different sources. The first known creator of fan video was Kandy Fong. Kandy Fong created the "songvid" in 1975 using Start Trek still images and a song. These days, fan-made have come a long, long way especially with the advent of affordable video-editing software and easier distribution over the Internet.