NEW YORK &#8212 The music video is shrinking.

With the music industry in crisis from falling sales and file sharing, labels have less cash to subsidize elaborate videos that will mostly be seen in miniature on computers. The result has been a major shift in the art form, as artists increasingly embrace the YouTube aesthetic with cheap, low-production videos.

The shrinkage of the video will be obvious Sunday at the MTV Video Music Awards, where grandiose, ambitious videos will seem like an exotic species facing extinction.

“The business is changing radically. It does feel smaller, cheaper,” said veteran music video director Samuel Bayer, whose many clips include Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Blind Melon’s “No Rain” and Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams..”

When MTV’s award show kicked off 24 years ago, the network was ushering in a new era where the video was king: a branding tool and an art form rolled into one. Today, the channel broadcasts mostly reality shows while YouTube, iTunes, MTV.com and various other online destinations have become the dominant viewing platform for videos.

Stavros Merjos, founder of HSI Productions and a longtime producer of videos for acts ranging from Britney Spears to Will Smith, doesn’t expect to ever see another $2 million video: “The record industry as a whole has shrunk. There’s not as much money to throw around.”

“In the end, even if you spend a lot on it, a video is a cheap way to get a band out there,” Merjos said. “There have been groups that have built their whole record sales on videos, not touring.