History of The Music Video

I decided to research about the History of The Music Video to find out more about Music Videos.

Music videos (also known as promo's, video clips) are short films which are used to promote a song through the use of visuals. Many Music Videos are used as a way of promoting singers or bands.

Music videos date back to the time of the first sound films. Music was used alongside many promotional shorts in order to make them more interesting. There were many Disney movies which were based around music from upcoming movies and were used as a type of promotion.

There were many Soundies which were eight 3 minute short films with music could be found in a Panoram Jukebox. This could be found in many pubs and taverns. It was used to view visuals whilst listening to music at the same time.

Between 1950 and 1954 many short musical films were made in America for the use of adverts between programmes.

Many videos were produced for the music programmes such as Top of The Pops in the late 1970's. BBC were very strict with TOTP and the amount of outsourced videos they were allowed to use. Therefore if a good music video was made people would want to buy it in the hope they would see it on the show the following week which increased sales.

In 1981 MTV was produced in America and was the first programme to produce 24 hour music television showing short clips from singers and bands and showing many music videos. The first video that was ever played on MTV was Video Killed The Radio Star by The Buggles.



Many other early MTV videos came from British bands such as Duran Duran. This band was not very popular at first and was not receiving much radio coverage. They produced very visually appealing videos and when broadcasted on MTV Duran Duran became very popular.



Many artists such as Michael Jackson and Madonna had their videos shown on MTV and were promoted by MTV to gain a wide audience.

In 1983 the most iconic music video was released by MTV by Michael Jackson. The song was 'Thriller' and the video was 14 minutes long. The video set extremely high standards for other artists after costing $500000 to film and make. This song and 'Billie Jean' were big videos that influenced more African American artists videos being played on MTV.