Electronic media is playing a strong role in construction, reconstruction of ideas, opinion and reframing the various understandings of every individual throughout life. Every passing day the world is socially revolutionized. Individuals have great influences from different sources of communication, performing a very strong role not only in the development of mature persons’ thinking but also in youngsters. A majority of people watch TV, use internet, and listen to radio and get exposure. The same case is with youth/youngsters, who accept more influence – negative or positive. However, there exist a considerable number of young people who draw inspiration from the contents of media material (Curtis, 2012).Mass media as an agent of socialization has a deep effect on viewers of all ages. In support of this, Miles(2000) opined that regardless of the actual time young people spend in watching television and using other media, there is no doubt that the mass media have played and will continue to play an important role in structuring young people’s lives in some shape and form in a period of rapid social change. According to Getalem and Armaye (2015) the influence of the media has resulted to the extent that all countries are inevitably experiencing greater informational and cultural exchange with the rest of the world and therefore subjecting themselves to foreign influences. As stated by Roberts and Christensen (2012), local traditions are joined by a host of additional cultural forms from abroad, presenting people with a confusing array of lifestyle options from which to choose. Established identities and ways of life are giving way to new forms of hybrid ‘identity’ composed of elements from contrasting cultural sources.
The above noted, have been attributed by many scholars as the influence of over watching of music videos. According to Muhammad and Bushra (2015), music plays an important role in the socialization of youth. They further noted that listening to popular music is considered by society to be a part of growing up experiences. Leming (2010) added that music provides entertainment and distraction from problems and serves as a way to relieve tension and boredom. Some studies have reported that adolescents use popular music to deal with loneliness and to take control of their emotional status or mood (North, Hargreaves and O’Neill, 2013). Nonetheless, American Academy of Pediatrics (1996) asserted that a handful of experimental studies indicate that music videos may have a significant behavioral impact by desensitizing viewers to violence and by making youth more likely to approve of premarital sex. Thus, there is a great negative impact of music videos in Nigeria and their effects are personal, dramatic and somehow immediate (Fisher, 2009).
Further, Took and Weiss (2010) observed that lyrics have become more explicit in youth references to drugs, sex, and violence over the years. They performed a content analysis of the top 10 CDs performed by the National Institute on Media in 2009 and it revealed that each of these CDs included at least one song with sexual content. Forty-two percent of the songs on these CDs contained very explicit sexual content.Lyrics of some music genres, such as rock, heavy metal, rap, and new emerging genres such as reggaeton, have been found to revolve around topics such as tautology, death, homicide, suicide, and substance abuse.
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