HISTORY OF MUSIC VIDEOS

What is A Music video?

• A music video is a short film or video that

accompanies a complete piece of music,

most commonly a song .

• Modern music videos were primarily made

and used as a marketing device intended

to promote the sale of music recordings.

Source: Wikipedia

• Music video has a history dating back to the

earliest days of sound film

• Early promotional shorts were sometimes set

to music and many early Disney films were

based around songs from upcoming films.

SOUNDIES

• Another early form of music video were one-song

films called Soundies made in the 1940s for the

Panoram visual jukebox . Thousands of Soundies

were made, mostly of jazz musicians.

• These were short films of musical selections, usually

just a band on a movie-set bandstand, made for

playing.

• These jukeboxes were in restaurants and bars and

people played to watch the clip while the music

played.

FIRST TV SHORT MUSIC CLIPS

The very first short musical films in the USA made

specifically for television were the Snader

Telescriptions More than 1000 short musical

presentations were filmed for use as television filler

between 1950 and 1954.

• Music centered films, with performance

clips in them became popular in the

1950s e.g Elvis Presley movies.

Musicals in Film

VIDEOS FOR MUSIC

PROGRAMES

• Videos began to be produced for music

programmes such as Top of The Pops in Britain

and Hullabaloo in the USA.

• Promotional clips for groups began to be

produced , especially the Beatles in the 1960s

and then other groups in the 1970s.

• In the UK, The Kinks made one of the first narrative-based

promo clips for their single Dead End Street (1966) which

involved a miniature comic movie. Other key artists during this

time were The Rolling Stones and David Bowie, who both had

clips rejected by the BBC for distasteful content, starting with

footage based on the drug prosecutions of Mick Jagger and

Keith Richards (The Rolling Stones) in “We Love You” and the

homosexual themes in Bowie’s “John, I’m Only Dancing”.

MTV

• In 1981 , the U.S. video channel, MTV, was

launched, beginning an era of 24-hour-a-day

music on television

• The first video ever played was The Buggles

“Music Killed the Radio Star”. MTV continues to

be dominant and now reaches more than 320

million TV sets in 90 countries over 5 continents

• Downloading of videos off the internet is now

common and this is seen as a threat to the

dominance of MTV.

MICHAEL JACKSON

• Thriller,1983 one of the most iconic and

successful music videos of all time.

• The video set new standards for production,

costing nearly $800,000.

• Jackson’s other music videos including ‘Billie

Jean’ and ‘Beat It’ saw the breakthrough for

African American artists’ music videos on MTV.