Music Video
– 'A music video or song video is a short film integrating a song and
imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes. Modern music videos are
primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of
music recordings.’ – Wikipedia
Music
Video’s are seen everywhere these days, you can rarely turn on the TV without
seeing some sort of music video, Obviously this wasn’t always the case as there
was a long period in which music was produced when there wasn’t any way of
creating music videos, people wanted to see the artist as well as hear their
music. The first solution of this came with Top of The Pops which started in
1964, Top of the pops allowed viewers to see the top artists of the time
performing live from their living rooms every Thursday evening. The very first
artist to perform on the show was The Rolling Stones with their hit song ‘I
wanna be your man.’
The very
first appearance of music videos was started with Feature Films which contained
the Songs of an artist as their soundtrack and often starred the actual
Performer, Artist Elvis Presley featured in many feature films including Love Me Tender (1956) and Jailhouse Rock (1957.) This was to promote
his music and also give the cinema viewers chance to see him performing. These
were the earliest examples of Artists performing their music on the Big Screen
for the Public to see.
In 1964 The
Beatles, released the first ‘promotional film,’ A hard day’s night which was shot in black and white and was
presented as a mock documentary. The idea behind this concept was to allow the
public to see their artists performing their songs in surreal situations to entertain
the audience whilst letting them see the artist perform. This Kick-started a decade long concept which
continued with The Beatles second release with Help! In 1965 which was filmed
in colour and had parts shot abroad in Switzerland and The Bahamas. These
Feature Films continued throughout the 60’s including the documentary Don’t
look Back, which focused on the UK Tour of Bob Dylan.
Music
Television (MTV) formally launched on August 1st 1961, was the first
channel to air what is the modern day equivalent of a music video, in 1981 it
started airing them around and at the time it started to play music videos only
a few Music Videos had been created so they were looped constantly throughout
the programs on MTV, it is said that the Beatles feature film A hard Day’s Night inspired the creation
of MTV. The very first music video to be played on MTV was ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ by The Buggles. This was one of the
earliest music videos, and it contained a small narrative, but was mainly
performance.
Because of
Music Video’s, songs started to reach number one in the charts. David Bowie was
the first example of this, his iconic and controversial video for ashes to
ashes in which he is dressed like a woman, which was part of the whole act of
Bowie, reached number one in 1980, and after this Music Video’s started to
boom, all artists started to create them, perhaps one of, if not the most
famous example is the video for Bohemian Rhapsody, made in 1975, it was this
video which convinced British record companies to start making promotional
video’s for other bands that they had contracts with. The band recorded the
video to be shown on Top of the Pop’s due to them being unable to appear
because they were on tour and didn’t want to mime to the song because of its
complexity. It is still one of the most famous music videos of all time.
Just as
music video’s were starting to just be the same length of the song, Michael
Jackson went a stage further and created Thriller
which was a 14 minute long short movie, created in 1983 Thriller took music videos to a new
level. The video cost $500,000 to make and is frequently referred to as one of
the most influential music videos of all time. The video which follows the
codes and conventions of a teen American horror movie is still one of the most
watched music videos even today.
There are
four main types of music video that exist although many artists have created
hybrids between two or more of the four, these are: Performance, in which an
artist will be shown performing the song in a set scenario, e.g walking down a
street or in a room at a hotel e.t.c. Performance music video’s where the first
music video’s to be made and was the most common video’s at the time. An early
example of a performance video is the Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody in which the
band are playing the song on a range of different places, and performing for
the audience. This video was created for Top of the Pops so it had to show the
band performing the song due to this been what was normal at the time.
After the
popularity of music videos started to expand, more types of video began to
appear. The first was the narrative; this was a video that would focus on
telling a story. This type of video is often popular with songs that are
featured in movies and will often take clips from the movie it is featured in.
Although other video’s that have narratives only contain a story, with no
performance, one of the most famous examples of this would be the Right Here Right Now video by FatBoy
Slim. This video starts off in space and shows earth at the start and
follows a single cell evolving into what turns into a human and then the
character from the album cover for why
try harder.
A very
common combination of two of the types of music video been combined is the
Aerosmith – I don’t wanna miss a thing video, this takes clips from Armageddon
and the band is seen performing in different parts of the settings from the
movie. The video does have parts of a performance video, but it is used to tell
the story of Armageddon but without spoiling the film at the same time.
Abstract
music videos are the music videos that started to come around the mid 80’s; an
abstract video that was realised in 1986 by Peter Gabriel is the video for
SledgeHammer. The video has no narrative, and although the artist can be seen
almost all the way through the animation and the concept behind the video was
only to promote the artist. The video also contains animation which is the
final of the four types of music video; animation is fairly self explanatory
and is just a video using animation.
The Music
Video industry has taken another stop now, onto the internet. This first
started to happen in 2001, with the launch of iTunes, which allowed users to
purchase music videos and play them on their computers. Since then all artists
post their music videos online. YouTube then came along, and since its launch
in 2005, it has become one of the most visited websites alongside Face book and
even Google artists such as Justin Bieber and Iyaz have both been discovered
from their YouTube accounts. YouTube revolutionized the way people watch music
videos. Before YouTube music videos simply weren’t as accessible. In December
2009 three of the big four launched VEVO, a joined video streaming service to
promote their artists. VEVO is now linked in with YouTube and is one of the
most used services in the world.
