The past year has brought a few epic music videos in the tradition of theatrical clips like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” or Beastie Boys‘ “Sabotage”: mini-movies for Maroon 5’s “Wake Up Call”, Marilyn Manson’s “Heart Shaped Glasses” and Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around … Comes Around,” to name a few. But it was only a matter of time before the music-industry-wide cash crunch caught up with the onetime money-sucking music-video industry.

According to an Associated Press story that arrives just before the biggest weekend in the music-video biz, clips are becoming by necessity shorter and cheaper — even flamboyant artists like Kanye West experiment with quirkier, more lo-fi approachs (check out the irreverent Zach Galifianakis-starring clip for Kanye’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing.”) Says Samuel Bayer — who directed memorable videos including Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, Blind Melon’s “No Rain”, Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and this year’s VMA-nominated “What Goes Around” by JT — “The business is changing radically. It does feel smaller, cheaper.” So are video budgets and ambitions shrinking to match the size of the screens the clips are watched on?

It’s obvious that video directors are being forced to think about twenty-first-century formats like video iPods, as well as new outlets like on-demand Web video. Chris Applebaum, who worked on Rihanna’s VMA-nominated “Umbrella,” said, “I had a lunch with Rihanna and [Jay-Z] and we talked about the fact that most people are going to watch things on their laptop. It’s important to be bold and simple and to find the elegance in simplicity.” Even “What Goes Around” director Bayer, who spent $1 million on the video, thinks his cinematic style is a dying art. “A comet hit the earth and the dinosaurs are dying,” says Bayer. “There’s a new age coming. I think those days are over with.”