Music videos can be characterised by 3 broad typologies.
PERFORMANCE
Performance is used in music videos to give the viewers a sense of a concert experience, and depending how good the performance looks it could bring up ticket sales. Visuals that are mostly orientated by performance show the views that the actual recording and playing of the music is the most important factor to the band/artist. Examples of videos that contain this are ones by The Killers and Ed Sheeran as they use real concert footage and also give the audience a little behind the scenes view of themselves.
NARRATIVE
Narrative within a music video is usually linear and tends to evolve around a love story. "Action in the story is dominated by males who do things and females who passively react or wait for something to happen." - Schwichienberg, 1992. Essentially they are all based around a story whether it be related to the songs lyrics or not, it more or less always uses words, factors or feelings from the song. The main genres to use a narrative are R&B and Pop although it is very common across all types and sub genres.
CONCEPTUAL
Conceptual videos contain metaphors to create a mood, ones that offer multiple meanings to different people, and the visuals don't necessarily have any relation to the song.
All these types explain the form and describe the content that has been chosen either by the artist or director in a way to attract views and please fans and audience members and also convey messages both direct and indirect.
