The History of Music Video

A music video is described as a short film integrating sound and imagery produced for promotional or artistic purposes.

-1926- the arrival of the "talkies" allowed many musical short films to be produced. Vitaphone shots featured bands, singers and dancers.
-Early 1930s -animated films such as Fantasia were built around music.

Musical films were very important to music videos, several well known music videos have been imitated from style of Hollywood classic music videos for example Madonna's, Material girl (1985) was inspired from Jack Coles staging of Diamonds Are A Girls Best Friend from the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Another example of this is shown in several Michael Jackson videos for example Thriller and Bad as these were stylised from West Side Story.

-1950s-visual jukebox, Scopitone was invented and short films produced by French Artists such as Serge Gainsbourg to accompany songs, this then spread to other countries such Colour-Sonic in USA.
-1964-The Beatles starred in their first film A Hards Days Night shot in black and white using both comedic and dialogue sequences with music, their second feature Help! was much more lavish as it was filmed in colour in London and international locations, the title track sequence filmed in black and white is one of the prime modern performance style music videos using cross cutting, contrasting long shots, close-ups and unusual shots and camera angles. The Beatles began making promotional clips distributing and broadcasting in other countries, firstly USA, so they could promote record releases without making in person appearances.
-1967 they filmed colour promotional clips for Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane this took the promotional film format to a new level, using techniques such as reversed film and slow motion.
-1966, Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues showed an attempt to start performance based music videos.

-Late 1970s-Top of the Pops began playing music videos, although being strictly placed limits on the amount of outsourced videos could used, therefore to increase song sales a good music video had to be shown. In -1972 -Queens Bohemian Rhapsody was shown in Top of The Pops this became noticeable for being shot and entirely edited on videotape.

-1981- MTV launched airing Video Killed the Radio Star, thus beginning the 24-hour-a-day music on television. With this new outlet music videos by the mid-1980s would grow to play a main role in popular music marketing. Modern Music Videos had two new innovations as they were relatively inexpensive and easy-to-us recording and editing equipment, during this period directors and acts worked to explore and expand form and style of the genre using effect in videos mixing both film and video and adding storyline/plot to the music video.

-2004 -YouTube was launched making it faster and easier to view videos,the use of websites such as this allowed some artists to see success as their music videos are seen mostly or entirely on-line. OK Go have exemplified this trend achieving fame through videos such as Here it Goes Again(2006) .