By the end of the 1980s, magazines,  radio airplay, and word of mouth had increased the prominence and highlighted the diversity of alternative rock, helping to define a number of distinct styles such as gothic rock, jangle pop, noise pop, indie rock, indie pop, grunge, industrial rock, alternative hip hop, and rap rock.

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The name "alternative rock" essentially serves as an umbrella term for underground music that has emerged in the wake of punk rock since the mid-1980s. Throughout much of its history, alternative rock has been largely defined by its rejection of the commercialism of mainstream culture.

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What are the conventions of alternative rock music videos?

In most alternative rock videos there sometimes is a narrative within thevideo that can either tell the story and follow the lyrics of the song. However it can also ignore the lyrics and become something along the linesof a random video. Even though the video may become random it will still have a meaningbehind it but not what the lyrics have to say.

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With the narrative structure of the video there is also a performancestructure of the band usually lip syncing and playing the drums and guitars. In many alternative rock music videos we always have the cuts between theactual performance of the song to the narrative which usually stars the band either showing themselves as fictional characters or just in general, themselves.

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Most actors in Alternative Rock videos will have a certain attitude to life, sort of a carefree, placid attitude with the 'I don't care style'. Because a lot of Alternative Rock videos have a lot of performance based videos or the lead singers are included in the story, we see a lot of the band in general as the song plays.

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The setting for various Alternative Rock videos take place in quite grungy areas of cities/run down buildings, music stores with small stages, underground areas and general outdoor spaces etc.

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Iconography is the visual interpretation of symbols and images. Alternative Rock is normally represented through the band themselves in their videos as a large portion of their videos are performances based, the props used that are linked to the Genre help to show the iconography such as alcohol/drugs etc. to help show the iconography for Alternative Rock.

When the video shows more of a story rather than performance, Iconography is also used to help convey the conventions and/or stereotypes for that story so that it is easy to understand what is happening/what genre is being portrayed