The History Of Music Videos.

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A music video is a short film or video that accompanies a piece of music. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings. Although the origins of music videos date back much further, they came into prominence in the 1980s, when MTV based their format around the medium. Prior to the 80s, these works were described by various terms including "illustrated song", "filmed insert", "promotional (promo) film", "promotional clip" or "film clip". In Chinese entertainment, music videos were simply known as "MTVs" because the network was responsible for bringing music videos to popularity in that country.

Music videos use a wide range of styles of film making techniques, including animation, live action, filming, documentaries, and non-narrative approaches such as abstract film. Some music videos blend different styles, such as animation and live action. Many music videos do not interpret images from the song's lyrics, making it less literal than expected.

In 1894 sheet music publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hired electrician George Thomas and various performers to promote sales of their song "The Little Lost Child". Thomas projected a series of still images on a screen simultaneous to live performances. This would become a popular form of entertainment known as the illustrated song, the first step toward music video.

In 1926, with the arrival of "talkies" many musical short films were produced. Vitaphone shorts (produced by Warner Bros.) featured many bands, vocalists and dancers. 'Spooney Melodies' in 1930 was the first true musical video series. Shorts were typically six minutes in duration, and featured Art-Deco-style animations and backgrounds combined with film of the performer singing.

Musical Films were another important precursor to music video, and several well-known music videos have imitated the style of classic Hollywood musicals from the 1930s to the 1950s. One of the best-known examples is Madonna's 1985 video for 'Material Girl' (directed by Mary Lambert, which was closely modelled on Jack Cole's staging of"Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" from the film 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes'. Several of Michael Jackson's videos show the unmistakable influence of the dance sequences in classic Hollywood musicals, including the landmark "Thriller" and the Martin Scoreses-directed "Bad" which was influenced by the stylised dance "fights" in the film version of 'West Side Story'. In 1957, Tony Bennett was filmed walking along The Serpentine in Hyde Park, London as his recording of Stranger in Paradise" played; this film was distributed to and played by UK and US television stations. According to the Internet Accuracy Projec, disk jockey-singer J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson was the first to coin the phrase "music video", in 1959. It is no coincidence that the rise of popular music was tied with the rise of television, as the format allowed for many new stars to be exposed that previously would have been passed over by Hollywood, which normally required proven acts in order to attract an audience to the box office.

In the late 1950s the Scopitone, a visual jukebox, was invented in France and short films were produced by many French artists, such as Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy, Jacques Brel, and Jacques Dutronc to accompany their songs. Its use spread to other countries and similar machines such as the Cinebox in Italy and Color-Sonic in the USA were patented. In 1961 Ozzie Nelson directed and edited the video of "Travelin' Man" by his son Ricky Nelson. It featured images of various parts of the world mentioned in the Jerry Fuller song along with Nelson's vocals. In 1964, Kenneth Anger's experimental short film, Scorpio Rising used popular songs instead of dialog.

In 1961, for Canadian show Singalong Jubilee, Manny Pittson began pre-recording the music audio, went on-location and taped various visuals with the musicians lip-syncing, then edited the audio and video together. Most music numbers were taped in-studio on stage, and the location shoot "videos" were to add variety.

One of the earliest performance clips was The Animals's 1964 hit "House Of The Rising Sun". This high-quality color clip was filmed in a studio on a specially-built set; with the group lip-synching.




In 1964, The Beatles starred in their first feature film A Hard Day's Night, directed by Richard Lester. Shot in black-and-white and presented as a mock documentary, it was a loosely structured musical fantasia interspersing comedic and dialogue with musical sequences. The musical sequences furnished basic templates on which countless subsequent music videos were modeled. It was the direct model for the successful US TV series The Monkees (1966–1968) which similarly consisted of film segments that were created to accompany various Monkees songs.



In 1965, The Beatles began making promotional clips (then known as "filmed inserts") for distribution and broadcast in other countries—primarily the USA—so they could promote their record releases without having to make in-person appearances. On November 23, 1965: At Twickenham Film Studios, The Beatles videotaped 10 black & white promo films, all produced by a British production company Intertel. They were "We Can Work It Out" (3 Versions), "Day Tripper" (3 Versions), "Help!" (1 Version), "Ticket To Ride" (1 Version), and "I Feel Fine" (2 Versions, neither of which were ever aired). One version each of the first two songs were aired on "Hullaballo" in the US on Jan 3 1966. Many clips were aired on "Top of the Pops" in the UK, and two were aired on "Thank Your Lucky Stars."





The colour promotional clips for "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", made in early 1967 and directed by Peter Goldman took the promotional film format to a new level. They used techniques borrowed from underground and avant garde film, including reversed film and slow motion, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles and color filtering added in post-production. Reflecting the fact that these studio masterpieces were impossible for the group to perform live, their psychedelic mini-films illustrated the songs in an artful, impressionistic manner rather than trying to simulate an idealised performance or depict a narrative or plot.




The Australian TV shows Countdown and Sounds, both of which premiered in 1974, were significant in developing and popularizing the music video genre in Australia and other countries, and in establishing the importance of music video clips as a means of promoting both emerging acts and new releases by established acts. In early 1974, former radio DJ Graham Webb launched a weekly teen-oriented TV music show which screened on Sydney's ATN-7 on Saturday mornings; this was renamed Sounds Unlimited in 1975 and later shortened simply to Sounds. In need of material for the show, Webb approached Seven newsroom staffer Russell Mulcahy and asked him to shoot film footage to accompany popular songs for which there were no purpose-made clips (e.g. Harry Nilsson's "Everybody's Talking"). Using this method, Webb and Mulcahy assembled a collection of about 25 clips for the show. The success of his early efforts encouraged Mulcahy to quit his TV job and become a full-time director, and he made clips for several popular Australian acts including Stylus, Marcia Hines, Hush and AC/DC.


The long-running British TV show Top of the Pops began playing music videos in the late 1970s, although the BBC placed strict limits on the number of 'outsourced' videos TOTP could use. Therefore a good video would increase a song's sales as viewers hoped to see it again the following week. In 1980, David Bowie scored his first UK number one in nearly a decade thanks to director David Mallet's eye catching promo for "Ashes to Ashes". Another act to succeed with this tactic was Madness, who shot on 16 mm and 35 mm, constructing their clips as "micro-comedic" short films.


American alternative rock group Devo created many self-produced music videos, which were included in the pioneering compilation "The Truth About Devolution", directed by Chuck Statler and Devo's video cassette releases were arguably among the first true long-form video productions.Also,one of their music videos "The Day My Baby gave me a Surprise" was the first to use Computer and traditional animation. Shock-rocker Alice Cooper took a video of his Welcome to My Nightmare concert showcasing the intense visual performance it gave. Alice Cooper himself makes reference to making one of the first music videos on the promotional videos for his album Along Came A Spider.



Video Concert Hall, created by Jerry Crowe and Charles Henderson, was the first nationwide video music programming on American television, predating MTV by almost three years. The USA Cable Network program Night Flight was one of the first American programs to showcase these videos as an artform. Premiering in June 1981, Night Flight predated MTV's launch by two months.

Two feature-length films released on the cusp of MTV's first appearance on the dial contributed enormously to the development of the form. The first was 1981's Shock Treatment, a pseudo-sequel/spinoff of The Rocky Horror Picture Show principally written and scored by RHPS creator Richard O'Brien. Although it was a commercial flop, the film broke stylistic ground by being more focused and less visually ambitious – and thus easier to emulate on a tight budget – than either RHPS or Ken Russell's 1975 adaptation of The Who's music and storyline from the album Tommy, or even a lower-budget affair like The Ramones' Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979).


In 1981, the U.S. video channel MTV launched, airing "Video Killed the Radio Star" and beginning an era of 24-hour-a-day music on television. With this new outlet for material, the music video would, by the mid-1980s, grow to play a central role in popular music marketing. Many important acts of this period, most notably Adam and the Ants, Duran Duran and Madonna, owed a great deal of their success to the skillful construction and seductive appeal of their videos.



Two key innovations in the development of the modern music video were the development of relatively inexpensive and easy-to-use video recording and editing equipment, and the development of visual effects created with techniques such as image compositing. The advent of high-quality color videotape recorders and portable video cameras coincided with the DIY ethos of the New Wave era, enabling many pop acts to produce promotional videos quickly and cheaply, in comparison to the relatively high costs of using film. However, as the genre developed, music video directors increasingly turned to 35 mm film as the preferred medium, while others mixed film and video. During the 1980s, music videos had become de rigueur for most recording artists. The phenomenon that was famously parodied by BBC television comedy program Not The Nine O'Clock News who produced a spoof music video "Nice Video, Shame About The Song". The genre was also parodied by Frank Zappa in his satirical 1984 song "Be In My Video". Its increasing dominance had earlier been critiqued by Joe Jackson in his 1980 song "Pretty Boys" (which still referred to videos as "promos").


In this period, directors and the acts they worked with began to explore and expand the form and style of the genre, using more sophisticated effects in their videos, mixing film and video, and adding a storyline or plot to the music video. Occasionally videos were made in a non-representational form, in which the musical artist was not shown. Because music videos are mainly intended to promote the artist, such videos are comparatively rare; three early 1980s examples are Bruce Springsteen's "Atlantic City", directed by Arnold Levine, David Mallet's video for David Bowie and Queen's "Under Pressure", and Ian Emes' video for Duran Duran's "The Chauffeur". Other notable later examples of the non-representational style include Bill Konersman's innovative 1987 video for Prince's "Sign o' the Times" – influenced by Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" clip, it featured only the text of the song's lyrics—and the video for George Michael's "Freedom 90" (1990), in which Michael himself refused to appear, forcing director David Fincher to substitute top fashion models in his place.



In 1983, the most successful and influential music video of all time was released — the nearly 14-minute-long video for Michael Jackson's song "Thriller". The video set new standards for production, having cost US$500,000 to film.That video, along with earlier videos by Jackson for his songs "Billie Jean" and "Beat It", also was instrumental in getting music videos by African American artists played on MTV. Earlier, such videos had been rare: according to MTV, this was because it initially conceived itself as a rock-music-oriented channel, although musician Rick James was outspoken in his criticism of the cable channel, claiming in 1983 that MTV's refusal to air the music video for his song "Super Freak" and clips by other African-American performers was "blatant racism".


The Canadian music channel MuchMusic was launched in 1984. In 1984, MTV also launched the MTV Video Music Awards (later to be known as the VMA's), an annual awards event that would come to underscore MTV's importance in the music industry.

In 1985, MTV launched the channel VH1 (then known as "VH-1: Video Hits One"), featuring softer music, and meant to cater to an older demographic than MTV. MTV Europe was launched in 1987, and MTV Asia in 1991. Another important development in music videos was the launch of The Chart Show on the UK's Channel 4 in 1986. This was a program which consisted entirely of music videos (the only outlet many videos had on British TV at the time), without presenters. Instead, the videos were linked by then state of the art computer graphics. The show moved to ITV in 1989.

The video for the 1985 Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" made pioneering use of computer animation, and helped make the song an international hit. Ironically, the song itself was a wry comment on the music-video phenomenon, sung from the point of view of an appliance deliveryman both drawn to and repelled by the outlandish images and personalities that appeared on MTV. In 1986, Peter Gabriel's song "Sledgehammer" used special effects and animation techniques developed by British studio Aardman Animation. The video for "Sledgehammer" would go on to be a phenomenal success and win nine MTV Video Music Awards.

In 1988, the MTV show Yo! MTV Raps debuted; the show helped to bring hip hop music to a mass audience for the first time.


In December 1992, MTV began listing directors with the artist and song credits, reflecting the fact that music videos had increasingly become an auteur's medium. Directors such as Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Mark Romanek and Hype Williams all got their start around this time; all brought a unique vision and style to the videos they directed. Some of these directors, including, Gondry, Jonze and F. Gary Gray, went on to direct feature films. This continued a trend that had begun earlier with directors such as Lasse Hallström and David Fincher.

Two of the videos directed by Romanek in 1995 are notable for being two of the three most expensive music videos of all time: Michael and Janet Jackson's "Scream", which cost $7 million to produce, and Madonna's "Bedtime Story", which cost $5 million. "Scream" remains the most expensive video of all time. During this period, MTV launched channels around the world to show music videos produced in each local market: MTV Latin America in 1993, MTV India in 1996, and MTV Mandarin in 1997, among others. MTV2, originally called "M2" and meant to show more alternative and older music videos, debuted in 1996.





The earliest purveyors of music videos on the internet were members of IRC-based groups, who recorded them as they appeared on television, then digitised them, exchanging the .mpg files via IRC channels. The website iFilm, which hosted short videos, including music videos, launched in 1997. Napster, a peer-to-peer file sharing service which ran between 1999 and 2001, enabled users to share video files, including those for music videos. By the mid-2000s, MTV and many of its sister channels had largely abandoned showing music videos in favor of reality television shows, which were more popular with its audiences, and which MTV had itself helped to pioneer with the show The Real World, which premiered in 1992.

2005 saw the launch of the website YouTube, which made the viewing of online video faster and easier; MySpace's video functionality, which uses similar technology, launched in 2007. Such websites had a profound effect on the viewing of music videos; some artists began to see success as a result of videos seen mostly or entirely online. The band OK Go may exemplify this trend, having achieved fame through the videos for two of their songs, "A Million Ways" in 2005 and "Here It Goes Again" in 2006, both of which first became well-known online. Artists like Soulja Boy Tell 'Em and Marié Digby also achieved some level of fame initially through videos released only online.

The 2008 video for Weezer's "Pork and Beans" also captured this trend, by including at least 20 YouTube celebrities; the single became the most successful of Weezer's career, in chart performance. In 2007, the RIAA issued cease-and-desist letters to YouTube users to prevent single users from sharing videos, which are the property of the music labels. After its merger with Google, YouTube assured the RIAA that they would find a way to pay royalties through a bulk agreement with the major record labels. This was complicated by the fact that not all labels share the same policy toward music videos: some welcome the development and upload music videos to various online outlets themselves, viewing music videos as free advertising for their artists, while other labels view music videos not as an advertisement, but as the product itself.



MTV itself now provides streams of artists' music videos, while AOL's recently launched AOL Music features a vast collection of advertising supported streaming videos. The Internet has become the primary growth income market for record company-produced music videos. At its launch, Apple's iTunes Store provided a section of free music videos in high quality compression to be watched via the iTunes application. More recently the iTunes Store has begun selling music videos for use on Apple's iPod with video playback capability.

To further signify the change in direction towards Music Video airplay, MTV officially dropped the Music Television tagline on February 8, 2010 from their logo in response to their increased commitment to non-scripted reality programming and other youth-oriented entertainment rising in prominence on their live broadcast.

In 2010, band OK Go released This Too Shall Pass, a music video that featured a giant Rube Goldberg machine that spawned over 2 stories of an LA warehouse. The video now has 15 million views on youTube alone.