The History of Music Video's

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 1^st 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.