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Introduction
The first form of music videos were established in 1926 and labelled 'Talkies, Soundies and Shorts’ which eventually carried on until the md 1950’s. Produced by the Warner Bros, vitaphone shorts featured many bands and dancers (the time was extremely buoyant and exciting.) Screen songs, which were short sing-along animation cartoons, were introduced by Max Fleischer. The invention invited audiences to sing along to songs as probably the most like comparison being modern karaoke as we know it. -
First examples of music videos
1929 – The earliest example accessible of music videos is that of a song by Bessie Smith in the film ‘St Louis Blues.’ The video contains other artists who appeared in the film and this is certainly the point to look back on as the birth of the music video age. The primary aim for the videos is too dissimilar to now. They were used in order to promote the music videos in a hope that sales for the film would increase. -
Musicals (1930-1950)
One of the most well-known genres other than the typical music videos genre is musical films. They are used subtly throughout musicals in order to move the narrative of a musical with good pace. Also, characters are often developed as a result of that too. Contrastingly, though, musical videos can sometimes serve as a break in the story in an attempt to give the musical a clear marketing tool – i.e. the song ‘Let It Go’ in the film ‘Frozen’ has subsequently made the musical film more popular. -
Soundies (1940-49)
1940-1949 – Soundies were one of the biggest genre of music video in America’s largest cities during the 1940’s. Cities such as Hollywood, New York and Chicago all produced short three-minute musicals that would often include dance sequences – much like music videos we see today. The last group of Soundies were released in March 1947 and the release of the videos was more than often just a few months after the filming took place. The videos were aired on coin generated jukeboxes. -
Music video clips
One of the first ever music videos shown to the world was that of the catchy ‘Jailhouse Rock’ tune by the famous star that was Elvis Presley. The video was one of the first ever to take a narrative stance and was set in a prison, unsurprisingly with the name of the song. As Presley was the undisputed king of music at the time, the music video industry boomed into a whole new era. The trend became huge with great chances emerging for people to use the idea of a music video. -
Scopitone
Scopitone is a type of jukebox featuring a 16 mm film component. The Italian Cinebox and Colour-Sonics were competing, lesser-known technologies of the time – meaning that yet another factor of the music video industry was gathering pace. With a firm base from the WWII Soundies tech, colour 16 mm film clips with a magnetic soundtrack were designed to be shown in a specially designed jukebox. The first Scopitones were made in France, by a company called Cameca on Blvd Saint Denis in Courbevoie. -
The Jackson 5
The 1970's saw the music video change with more emphasis on artists signing. This style lead to music videos to the "Cross-Cutting" stage where the song would portray a story that accompanied the lyrics and "cross-cuts" to the artist singing it. Nevertheless, the key to this proliferation was the editing process, dealing with more professional techniques like "Chroma-Key". -
Video Killed The Radio Star
The first video aired was "Video killed the radio star" after the introduction of 'MTV' to mainstream TV, it was a real break-through in the evolution of music videos and as you can see it was a very high-budget video in which we can see more development in editing such as "Over-laying". MTV also played a vital role in the marketing of artists and it still does to this very day. The most notable example of success through MTV is Madonna. -
Money for Nothing
The video for the 1985 Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" made for huge use of computer animation, and helped make the song an international anthem. Ironically, the song itself was a wry comment on the music-video phenomenon, sung from the point of view of an appliance deliveryman both drawn to and repelled by the images and personalities that appeared on MTV. -
IFILM
The website iFilm, which hosted short videos, including music videos, launched its service in 1997. Napster, a peer-to-peer file sharing service which ran from 1999 to 2001, enabled users to share video files, including those for music videos. -
Kings and Queens
"Kings and Queens" was featured as iTunes Store video of the week and was one of the most downloaded videos ever to be featured. The video also received four nominations at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, making 30 Seconds to Mars one of the most popular rock songs of that year. It was uploaded to popular video-sharing website YouTube on the same day of its release, where it has garnered over one hundred million views. It also received over forty million plays on MySpace.
