Video killed the radio star, as the first music video to ever air on MTV explained, and now TikTok and streaming services have killed the music video. For the time being, at least.

To be clear, music videos are not exactly dead. The vast majority of hit singles in 2024 still come with them. They circulate on TikTok in 15-second snippets, and some are even shared so widely they become communal timestamps of a moment -- your "WAP"s, "Montero"s, and "Espresso"s. These moments are few and fleeting, though, compared to the music video heyday of the 1990s. It's now common for a song like Miley Cyrus's 2023 hit "Flowers" to rack up 1.8 billion Spotify streams compared with 720 million YouTube views in the same year. Songs now tend to find fans through so many other means that official music videos too often come across like low-level line items on the album cycle checklist. Just one more prong in the PR strategy. But perhaps the time is right for them to become more than afterthoughts once again. Maybe a generation of music fans is ready for the video to make a cultural comeback -- whether they realize it or not.

"It's such a profound experience to discover a song through a music video, instead of hearing it on Spotify," says Eric Weiner, founder of music-centric creative agency The Wild Honey Pie, which produces videos and experiences for such artists as Iron and Wine, McKenna Grace, and Twin Shadow. "The connection you have with that artist, their music, and their personality is just a totally different beast when there's a visual component that has a style and a story."

At their best, music videos are a collision of art and commerce that inextricably link sight and sound in the minds of the masses. Close your eyes and think of Beyoncé, and perhaps you'll conjure her in a mustard-colored Cavalli gown laying waste to a car with a baseball bat. Or perched atop a sinking cop car. Or doing the "Single Ladies" dance in crisp black and white. Beyoncé's career began during an era when music videos were indispensable tools for turning artists into icons, and it shows. According to Weiner, that era might not just be the industry's past but also its future.