This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Artist News Business News Digital Labels & Publishers Marketing & PR
Music videos subtly promote cigarettes and alcohol to teens, says research
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 19 January 2016
Hey, music video makers, will you stop exposing teenagers to positive depictions of smoking and booze, because you’re killing our future generations.
Where would we be without our future generations? I mean, the kids might only watch your videos on YouTube, and with ad-blocking software installed so that you earn nothing, but how are you ever going to score enough viewing metrics to engage a strategic brand partner when everyone’s smoked and drunk themselves to death? Although, once everyone’s dead, you wouldn’t have to keep monitoring YouTube for unapproved uploads of your music I suppose. So it’s swings and roundabouts then.
Research conducted by the University Of Nottingham, and published last week by the Journal Of Epidemiology And Community Health, reviewed the videos – as posted on YouTube – of 32 tracks that charted between November 2013 and January 2014, looking for the number of “impressions” – so any verbal or visual reference – to consuming alcohol or tobacco products.
The videos for Jason Derulo’s ‘Trumpets’ and John Newman’s ‘Love Me Again’, and the pop promo from that pesky Robin Thicke with his ‘Blurred Lines’, all scored high on tobacco references, while Pitbull’s ‘Timber’ and Beyonce’s ‘Drunk In Love’ had the highest impressions of alcohol.
Having counted up the number of impressions across her sample set of videos, and then done some maths, researcher Dr Jo Cranwell said: “If these levels of exposure were typical, then in one year, music videos would be expected to deliver over four billion impressions of alcohol, and nearly one billion of tobacco, in Britain alone. Further, the number of impressions has been calculated on the basis of one viewing only [of each video], however, many of the videos had been watched multiple times, so this number is likely to be much bigger”.
Why does this matter? Well, Cranwell cites YouGov research that shows that teenagers are much more likely to be watching these videos than adults. And, she goes on, “it is well established that young people exposed to depictions of tobacco and alcohol content in films are more likely to start smoking or to consume alcohol”. Which is why smoking and drinking in films, and advertising for those products, is regulated. “But”, Cranwell concludes, “the effect of imagery in other media, including new online media such as YouTube music videos, has received relatively little attention”.
Videos posted to YouTube and Vevo are now being regulated to an extent in the UK, of course, as a result of a partnership between the majors and the British Board Of Film Classification to help parents control what content children see online. Though the new research says that the prevalence of positive references to smoking and drinking in some videos poses a “significant health hazard that requires appropriate regulatory control”.
