History of Music Videos

A music video is a short video/film that acompanies a complete piece of music. It helps to promote the artist or group by providing the audience with a visual image of the artist themselves performing the song. This is an essential part of the music industry as it fulfils audience gratification as it provides them with Voyeuristic pleasure when they see their actist performing on the scree in front of them.

The first ever music video was produced in 1930 by Warner Brothers. However in the 1930s they were called musical short films. Warner brothers created a series of these musical short films called "The spooney Melodie" with featured a range of artists, vocalists and dancers. They also used a variety of animations and backgrounds with the artists singing infront. Each short film lasted about 5 minutes.

In the 1940s promotional clips were produced fort the Panoram (visual jukebox). These clips laste about £minutes long and were usually shown in bars and cafes around New York and Hollywood throuhgout the fourties. After WW2 when TV became popular, these promotional clips lost there status and their popularity decreased.

In 1950 John David Wilson created a performance film for Fine Art Films. This included a performance of ballet and a music background called Petrushka. It was noted as being one of the first animated shows on television and was broadcast on NBC as the first music video.

In the 1960s, the beatles stared in their first feature film promoting one of their upcoming chart hits "A hard days night". The film was shot in black and white throughout and showed the group members freely walking about the shots providing the audience with Voyeuristic pleasure of just seeing the artist performing the song in their own personal way and reflecting their individual personalities to the audience. A large variety of other artist used this promotional video as a basic structure to their own videos eg- "The Monkees". Alson in the 1960s a feature film was produced for Bob Dylan "Subterranean Homesick Blues" where he stands down a street, not singing himself but presenting the song lyrics of the song on a variety of large cards. This is to show Bob Dylan to the audience but to gives the film a different entertaining approach in presenting the song to the audience.

In the 1970s promotionl clips continued to become more and more popular, programmes were being shown on tv with concert footage and camera effects to promote the specific artist an the song lyrics themselves, eg - The Midnight Special. A promotional video was made by apop photographer for a David Bowie track. The main purpose of this video was to promote his music internationally and not just in the UK. David Bowies pplarity dramatically increased with the release of this video. Also in the 1970s "Top Of The Pops" showed some of these promotional videos which helped with artist promotion and song sales.