"Why just make records?" Will.I.Am asked during a surprisingly philosophical conversation backstage at a Black Eyed Peas concert.

"Why not work with, like, people who make plays and really push the boundaries on what an artist delivers to the consumer?" he continued. "Nowadays you can see stuff on the telephone, you got so many outlets for music and content and little snacks here and there. ... Movie theaters, ATM machines, the gas station pumps — eventually, people are gonna be like, 'The Black Eyed Peas are everywhere!' "

The Peas are, admittedly, the last group on Earth in need of exposure, but Will has a point. With technology constantly growing and improving, why should bands continue to make only music when they can so easily add visual components to their work? It's a question with complicated answers (perhaps artists simply don't enjoy making videos — see below), but it's one more and more performers are starting to ask.

Last fall, pop-rock quintet the Sun released their debut album solely in DVD format, with each track featuring a video for a different song (fans could download the disc onto their computers to extract the audio). "People need as many ways to express themselves ... for whatever's going on in their heads as they can get," singer Chris Burney said.

Around the same time, 50 Cent released a bonus version of The Massacre with accompanying videos for all of its tracks. "Usually an artist can envision what he's writing about, but the general public never gets to see what he was thinking," 50 said. "I feel like [the videos] do that to my album, explain it more in-depth."

And in April, Death Cab for Cutie put out a DVD called "Directions," featuring videos inspired by every track on their Grammy-nominated 2005 release, Plans (see "Death Cab For Cutie Taking A Page From 50 Cent's Playbook").

A diverse group of bands is currently considering similar projects, including the Bravery, Taking Back Sunday, Papa Roach and Nada Surf.

"It seems like everyone you know is trying to be a video-maker, so we just call up all our friends, and we're like, 'If you wanna make a video, let's do it,' " Bravery singer Sam Endicott explained. "So we have videos for most of the songs on the album at this point, and ideally we make a video for every song and eventually put that out."

Since the advent of digital video a decade ago, next-door neighbor video directors generating clips on the cheap are nothing new, but what has changed over the last year is a band's ability to get those clips seen by a wide audience.

Now that iTunes sells videos, bonus DVDs are ubiquitous, cell phones with improving video technology can play videos, and Web sites like MySpace (and MTV.com, of course) stream thousands of clips, it seems the more videos an act has, the better.

"The best thing about it is you're no longer making videos just for singles," said Fred Durst, who released an online video for an album track called "The Truth" last year that he has since expanded into a short film (see "Durst Unveils 'The Truth' And It's Rage Against The Bizkit"). "You can make them for songs that deserve videos, and fans can still see 'em."

With new video outlets providing forums for different kinds of videos — from the standard to the experimental — to reach the public there's no question the landscape for videos has recently changed entirely, and most artists agree the shift is an improvement.

"From a fan's perspective, I think it's cool because sometimes a video is played for a short amount of time and you never see it again," System of a Down drummer John Dolmayan said. "I like videos, personally — then again, I used to watch Pink Floyd's 'The Wall,' like, once a week."

"It's just another way for artists to be able to show what they have," said Linkin Park's DJ and resident video director, Joe Hahn. "It's a great way for not just the big bands that have the opportunity on the mainstream level, but some of the smaller bands to get that exposure. And they're unrated, so more booty shaking!"

Booty aside, many believe more outlets for videos will only increase their quality.

"A great music video is definitely a lost art," Rise Against singer Tim McIlath said. "It would be great if something like video iPods could put more focus on what videos are, and what they were meant to be."

Hot Hot Heat frontman Steve Bays, who certainly has been a part of some stunning videos in his short career (see "Lens Recap: Hot Hot Heat's 'Goodnight' Results In Chafing"), is all for the further exposure of videos but questioned iTunes selling them.

"I always thought it was weird, the whole concept of paying money to watch a music video," he said. "I thought it would be like paying money to go onto, like, the Nike Web site to watch their commercial. Isn't that what videos are? Bands want you to see their video."

Nada Surf bassist Daniel Lorca, by contrast, argued that generating new venues for videos will allow bands to make clips that are more than short advertisements for themselves. "The fact that there are so many more outlets is gonna make it much more artistic," he said. "You can make very beautiful minimalist videos that are just a visual sort of accompaniment to the music."

"Visual accompaniment" is the key phrase, as the kind of clip that might not have come across as a video in the past is finding new life in a project like Death Cab's, which includes offbeat animation, a school orchestra playing along to one song and abstract visual collages. In other words, traditional music-video devices — like the band appearing in the clip and the maintenance of a linear plot — aren't required. In fact, the most attention-grabbing clip on the Sun's Blame It on the Youth is a collection of footage from a Web site where people submit videos of themselves masturbating, from the shoulders up.

That's certainly quite an experiment, but even simpler visual collages serve a purpose.

"I wonder if when people are listening to songs on, like, MySpace or something, if they're literally just staring at that frequency graphic and not doing anything else," Nada Surf singer Mathew Caws mused. "Obviously it would be nice to have some other experience."

Caws also wondered what would happen to the songwriting craft if there were always a coinciding visual to worry about. And to that end, there are artists who believe making more videos is time-consuming, a drain on resources — in short, a big mistake.

"It sounds cheesy, but I really do think the whole song 'Video Killed the Radio Star' is true," Korn singer Jonathan Davis said. "I like the days when just the music came out, and there was a mystique about the band you didn't know. You'd have to go see them to really get what it was about. It just seems like everything's been done in the video world, and it's kind of a necessary evil now. I wish there wasn't really any of that going on anymore."

Here, some other artists weigh in on whether they feel videos are a blessing or a burden:

Gwen Stefani: "For me, since No Doubt first came out with 'Just a Girl,' [making videos] was the funnest part. The songwriting is always the challenging, hard part, and the videos are the fun kind of icing on the cake. Especially getting dressed up."

Noel Gallagher, Oasis: "I f---ing hate videos. It's sh--, man. They just cost too much money, and it's three or four days out of your life where you could be doing something else and you gotta wear makeup and you end up miming so many times to the song that you end up f---ing loathing the song so much."

Beck: "Sometimes they're just TV commercials for the band, or they can be an expression of you. To me, I always look at them as a weird obligation, but you might as well make something interesting out of it, you know, work with some of your friends or use it as an excuse to get a bunch of weird costumes and dress up like a heavy-metal band."

Sam Endicott, the Bravery: "It's probably the most stressful part. We never really thought about making videos before we started the band, and now we're in the position of trying to come up with the ideas ourselves, trying to be really involved with it. It's a bizarre thing, 'cause what you have in your head has nothing to do with how it looks when it's done, and that's just the way video-making is. But sometimes it comes out better."

Win Butler, the Arcade Fire: "We're kind of at the place that probably a lot of bands in the really early '80s were, which is just that we don't have any budget. We spend, like, 20,000 Canadian bucks on a video, whereas most of the videos I really like are at least half a million bucks, so it's kind of hard to compete on the aesthetic level. You have all these things you'd really like to do, but no one's writing the check for us."

Jack Johnson: "I've never wanted to do videos because [during] the era I grew up, they were always real serious, guys taking themselves too seriously."

Ricky Wilson, Kaiser Chiefs: "I've liked every one of our videos, and I've quite liked doing them as well. We always have a lot to say about the videos. It's like you spend all your time making the music perfect; why would you just give it to someone else and say, 'Here you go, ruin it for me'?"

For complete digital music coverage, check out the Digital Music Reports.