Before I begin, I should acknowledge that “Whither the Music Video” is not a complete sentence, yet has come to gain legitimacy through years of misuse in cool titles for articles about the sorry state of [insert dying/in-transition art form].

Branching off of Dan’s recent entry re: Coldplay’s videos, it seems to me that this has been the sad standard for some time now. The more artists that leave record labels to galvanize their own fan bases however they see fit, the more that the task of the music video falls into the hands of a friend or assistant who records some blandly candid backstage footage, which more often than not winds up buried in the band’s MySpace page. And even when the suits do throw a little Thanks-For-Not-Doing-Heroin-This-Era money at their bands, the videos just look like the same low-budjy turds, only polished. Shake the camera a lot to cover up the lack of a set, overexpose to cover up the lack of a set, pack the thing with tight close-up shots of the singer’s face to cover up the…well, you get it.

What’s it worth anyway, when these days the largest window you’ll ever see the video play on is about the size of a burrito?

But it’s not just the money disappearing or the format changing. The faith has been lost, if only temporarily, in the power of a music video to brand a new artist or transform an established one’s perception. Maybe people collectively think of music as a barrage of emotion-information, instantly available and meant to be processed at speeds approaching ADHD, but that’s a little cynical. My guess is that, now, always and forever, people only get out of music what they put into it: They can tire of a hit single after digesting the catchy hook enough times and move on quick, but should they choose to really apply what a group’s saying to their life experiences, they connect with it more and start looking up show dates or blow all $25 of their remaining retirement savings on the hoodie.

See, it used to be enough to buy the record on the release date and throw a listening party with your like-minded friends. But I think the era of the more passive listener now has to share room with the new breed of consumer, who wants to vote for the next American Idol, who wants to download the song on Guitar Hero and interact with the chords, who wants to chop and screw their own versions of the song/video and put it online for their friends/one guy in Michigan who hates it/family to see.

As expected, the next wave of artists, bred to appeal to the next wave of young fans, are establishing that kind of interactive presence. Soulja Boy is a self-made man and Paramore lent their name to promotional segments for the Rock Band launch – as seen, coincidentally, on TRL, a once-humongous music video show soon to be cancelled. (Unfortunately, Paramore, your rock advice to video-game band Carrie Me Home was in vain! Muahaha.) Bang Camaro, in a daring bastardization of the last bastion of musical integrity, invites members of the audience to come onstage and sing all the lyrics to their songs, the clearest synthesis of Artist and Consumer there is. Of course, that kind of sharing has been going on since Green Day was first putting their fans on bass in packed stadiums, but never before has the presence of the audience been invited to overtake the identity of the band with oppressive gang vocals.

Remember when bands used to get pissed at your for stealing the spotlight by stage-diving? Not anymore. They really need you to like them these days.

Twenty-somethings see hardly any of the bands they grew up with getting promoted (except maybe Weezer, which continues to produce the sound of an empty pistol clicking against their collective temple, album after album). The reason: We had our chance to absolve a long time ago when the labels successfully ass-punished Napster. Instead we retreated into the untold glories of Morpheus, Bearshare, Limewire, and other P2Ps, because we seriously, seriously thought music should be free all of a sudden. So with radio all but dead and the industry moving on to new, youth-skewing forms of promotion, we’re left to our own devices and the blogs of many a well-meaning hipster to figure out what the hell we want to listen to next – oh, and this new bone we’re getting thrown in the form of iTunes’ Genius App and Pandora. Not sure how those will work or evolve yet.

Point is, it’s all about the next demo now, and the next demo doesn’t care about music videos. They only knew them as Disney Channel commercials, or as locations for singers’ boyfriends to hang out and wind up in the gossip pages of OK! Their relevance has diminished because the community that once touted videos as art (that’s us if you’re not keeping track) dove into torrents and ditched the support of artists to save cash on their albums – and visionaries like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry gotta eat too, so any ambitious, creative voices simply traded up for film or went home.

Those and similar video directors’ collected works stand, in my opinion, as the last great gasp of music videos, an important series of artifacts that occupy the screen at dorm room parties as a reminder of how we used to process the identities of bands we liked and how, even in the act of commerce, they could excel at art. It’ll take a lot more than the next set of fresh video ideas to bring it back; we’re going to need to come to the conclusion as a generation that we ourselves are not nearly as clever or talented at interpreting music for ourselves as we currently think we are, and that we need both the help of the directing wunderkinds to do it and the labels to put it in front of our faces enough times.

So essentially, we’d have to get over ourselves and spend money doing it. Yeeeah. That’ll happen.