Music Videos in Metal--Why?!?

Rhetorical question.

(This doesn't have to be a rhetorical question, but I doubt there will be any comments)

Why do metal bands make music videos anymore?

This question has been burning in my mind for the last few years, especially after I discovered the wonderful nerd's paradise that is the blogmosphere.  You see, I would think that, with the advent of music piracy and the ridiculous ease with which we can steal music from the bands that we love/like/want to love/like, it seems like the music video is a dead marketing tool, on par with teaching dogs to bark the melodies of popular tunes, or perhaps bundling albums with sacks of spice from the Orient.  So why do people still make music videos?

I'm not going to lie to you and pretend that I have been into music videos since I was just a little lamb and MTV played music videos as part of their standard daily programming.  Back then, before I could just Google "Rage Against the Machine Mediafire," I had to sit around waiting for MTV or my local rock radio station to play "Bulls on Parade," because the album wasn't out yet and there was no such thing as an album leak.  It was like the Middle Ages!

Also, I had the plague.

Back then, music videos served a vital purpose, which was to present music with images in a way that would inflame the senses of the young and propel them to their local Sam Goody (is THAT even a thing anymore, either?) to *gasp* buy an album or two.  And we did it, and we liked it.  Like I said, it was the Middle Ages, and we all crapped in pots and thought that annoying women who accidentally ate bad wheat were witches.  It was a simple time when nothing could bring the community together like the public drowning a gibbering woman in a pond.

I'm just kidding.  The crowd really only showed up when we set them on fire!

She's got me soul!  BURN 'EM AAAALLLL!

 

But now, since they made it illegal to burn people on suspicion of witchcraft and made it super easy to just download every bit of music we could possibly want without ever paying for it, I wonder more and more what the point of making a music video is.  Nobody plays them on television, and the only outlets that cover metal music videos are blogs where anybody who wants to hear the music has already downloaded it and wrote about it on their stupid, pointless blog (yo).  By the time the video for a song even comes out, most of us nerdmos have formulated a douchey opinion about the whole album and either panned it because it sounds good and people like it or hail it because it sounds like shit and has dumb album artwork.

I don't watch any music videos.  The last ones that I watched were for Cephalic Carnage, Cut Your Teeth, and Maruosa (which I wrote about here).  Realistically, the only way to get me to watch your music video these days is if it's labeled NSFW (Cephalic Carnage--and don't watch the video for "Ohrwurm unless you've got more intestinal fortitude than I do), if Cosmo Lee tells you to (Cut Your Teeth--and Cosmo didn't tell me to do it on Invisible Oranges, but told me the old fashioned way, by sending a coded signal into the receiver in my jawbone and telling me to do it in a language that only I can hear and understand), or by being really fucking weird (Maruosa--seriously, check it out).  So why spend the money unless you're going to make something that I can watch that has boobs in it but that also plays heavy metal music so that my wife stays away and doesn't see what I'm watching?  Why make a music video that isn't crawling with nudity or thick with the most bizarre shit that Japan's worst acid trip has to offer?

Does anybody watch music videos anymore?  And if so, why?

I, for one, am tired of music videos.  I used to dream of being the star of a music video, but like all of my childhood dreams (including having my own car and being a treasure-hunting multimillionaire guitar virtuoso on the international space station), this dream has been beaten to death my cruel, unrelenting reality.  But now I look at that dream and realize that, unless I managed to get into a band when I was about 11, I would never have been a music video star like all the bands whose albums I actually bought.  I think the music video should be quietly laid to rest (unless there's nudity) and we should all move on with our lives, just like when we set all of those frantically hallucinating women aflame with our torches.

Oh, for the good olde days.

Tell me why music videos aren't stupid in the comments.