Visualizer

In today’s music streaming culture visualizers are now a ‘thing. But let’s try to demystify and understand the concept first.

The term had since been used over the years in long psychedelic audiovisual experiences and originates from “music visualization” functions in electronic media playing software. If you’re above the age of 20 (like me), you’re likely to remember these old visualizers from Windows Media Player; twisting, colorful graphics that moved with the frequencies of the audio.

A visualizer tends to be less developed and fully-fledged than the regular videos and aims to be a simplistic visual intended to accompany the song.

Artists by calling their video-clips “visualizers” are supposedly arguing that their video is gonna be some visual representation of their final work, or in some cases eventually, the starting point for a new release.

Like a mood board, this could be a way for them to experiment with different concepts without having to develop them into a plot.

The visualizer needs to play with different aesthetics, movements, the palette of colors, look and feel, etc. That’s why the idea of a visualizer puts more pressure on the artists to make more complex and realized music videos in a long term.

This could just be a new way to entice fans to listen to new releases and these videos are doing exactly that, once they are statistically able to perform better than a simple lyric video.