Noone needed them. They can ruin a long lived and loved song and change what you imagined the meaning of the song. They are always low budget looking no matter the money they clearly have. Who thought music needed imagery over what's in your head, the whole medium is to be listened to, not fed into your eyeballs and then you find out the artist had remarkably different intentions. 

YouTube set me up with a "Supermix", I hit it on my PS5 which I don't usually do. I'm earphones, YouTube music app and I kept watching only for songs I loved to be destroyed by the way the Music video betrays them.

The only exception is movies soundtracks with scenes from the film the song is from and that's cause the videos are high production and evoke the films themes. Someone here made an "unintentionally funny music video" thread, I say they all are but nothing funny, just funnily produced. Why bother ruining a song with mental imagery when the song is supposed to do that in your head. Imagine a classical artist like Bach or Pacabel putting up a music video, those songs are music videos in their own right.

Counterpoint: the music video to Bismarck by Sabaton goes hard as fuck

I've never heard the song before but exactly my point. Watching them bang there heads and having a very specific theme towards what's on the video ruins what your mind can muster. The song is amorphous, the video is set in stone. 

When September ends by green day also has a great video much like this but it ads nothing. That song could be about so much without the video, it could mean whatever you feel and then seeing it on MTV locks it into being a song about a soldier leaving his girlfriend. It added nothing but a defined theme that wasn't asked for. 

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The song here isn't amorphous though, the words are about something.

You know you can just... not watch the music video right? It's not compulsory, you can just ignore it completely and listen to the song is isolation.

If you want to have your own imagination about a song nobody stops you but musicians can also show you with a video what they had in mind when they wrote a song. Sure, many musicians nowadays don't even write their own songs or aren't really involved in the planning of the music video but that's something else to discuss.

I find it odd to tell musicians that their song shouldn't be presented by a video which shows what they had in mind when they created the song because you want to use your own imagination. Then you can also use that argument for the whole song and say that a song by someone else doesn't represent your own imagination so that you should make your own music for yourself.

I almost exclusively listen to music without any text. When I start to try and actually listen to the words almost without fal the music gets worse imo. Most texts are simply awful. I think the display from music videos might have a similar effect.

I don't know. When I was a kid I really liked a lot of songs because of the music videos, specifically when they had a lot of hot girls. I probably wouldn't have liked so many of them without the music videos.

I've never much listened to music, so for me music videos were always the major window to music. Now that for a decade or so there hasn't been a handy music video channel on TV to leave on, I've generally missed all new music (not that it seems to be a big loss).
Being a big movie guy, I'm afraid I appreciate music videos more than the music itself.

The is nothing wrong with music videos. Also, if you do not like them, it's pretty easy to avoid them.