Why do people watch music videos, especially tweens and teenagers?

I have a bunch of teenaged cousins, and they do the majority of their music listening on YouTube. They even DJ parties with it using playlists. Anytime they have a choice, they’ll always prefer music with some kind of video accompanying it, even if it’s just a still of the album cover.

[iframe_loader width=”640″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/M37VucWh06Y” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen]

Teenagers like music for its own sake, but they’re also using it for a specific developmental goal: to define themselves and their tribal allegiances, and to learn about the tribal allegiances of others. This is why their hairsplitting arguments about the difference between two similar-sounding genres carry so much heat — it’s not about classifying the music, it’s about classifying themselves. The visuals add a lot of valuable social context to the music. You can see what the artists look like, their age and race and class, how they dress, how and if they dance, what instruments they show themselves using, what kind of physical settings they inhabit. If the videos are stylized and fantastic, there’s still plenty of information there; it’s just more emotional and symbolic.

[iframe_loader width=”640″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/LOZuxwVk7TU” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen]

The only people I know who watch music videos on TV are nostalgic old Gen Xers like me. Kids exclusively watch on the computer, or on their phones. They do it mostly in their bedrooms, but can really watch anywhere they happen to be if they have smartphones. The sharing and discussion of the videos is as important as the videos themselves, thus the appeal of YouTube and its easy integration with Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter etc.

Original post on Quora