History of Music VideosBy Alina Haq

Music Videos•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.

Continued…• Music videos are often called promotion videos or simply promos, due to the fact that they are usually promotional devices. Occasionally, music videos are termed short-form music videos to distinguish them from full length movies pertaining to movies.

• In the 1980s, the term “rock video” was often used to describe this form of entertainment, although the term has fallen into disuse.

Disney• In 1940, Walt Disney released Fantasia, an animated film based

around famous pieces of classical music.

Early Music Videos• The earliest music videos or music promos were filmed in the mid

1950’s, however, before then, as early as the 1920’s, films by animators such as Oskar Fischinger were accompanied by musical scores labelled ‘visual music’.

• The early animated efforts of Walt Disney, his Silly Symphonies, were built around music. The Warner Brothers cartoons, even today billed as Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies , were initially fashioned around specific songs from upcoming Warner Brothers musical films . Live action musical shorts, featuring such popular performers as Cab Calloway , were also distributed to theatres.

• The Panoram jukebox with eight three-minute sounds were popular in taverns and night spots, but it eventually faded during World War II.

1950s and 1960s Developments• In 1956 Tony Bennett was filmed walking along The Serpentine in

Hyde Park, London for his shooting of ‘Stranger in Paradise’. The film was distributed to and played by UK and US television stations, leading Bennett to later claim that he made the first music video.

• According to the Internet Accuracy Project, disk jockey -singer J.P. ‘The Big Bopper’ Richardson (d. 1959) was the first to coin the phrase “rock video”

• Around 1960 the Scopitone, a visual jukebox, was invented in France and short films were produced by many French artists, such as Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy and Jacques Dutronc to accompany their songs. It became famed in other countries and similar machines such as the Cinebox in Italy and Color-Sonic in the USA were patented.

Continued…• The defining work in the development of the modern music video was The Beatles first major

motion picture, A Hard Day's Night in 1964 , directed by Richard Lester . The musical segments in this film arguably set out the basic visual vocabulary of today's music videos, influencing a vast number of contemporary musicians, and countless subsequent pop and rock group music videos.

• Although, unashamedly based on A Hard Day's Night, the hugely popular American TV series ‘The Monkees’ was another important influence on the development of the music video genre, with each episode including a number of specially-made film segments that were created to accompany the various Monkees songs used in the series. The series ran from 1966 to 1968.

• The Beatles took the genre to new heights with their ground-breaking films for ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ made in early 1967 , which used techniques borrowed from underground and avant-garde films, such as reversed film effects, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles and rhythmic editing. Created at the height of the psychedelic music period, these two landmark films are among the very first purpose-made concept videos that attempt to “illustrate” the song in an artful manner, rather than just creating a film of an idealized performance.

• In 1966 the clip of Bob Dylan performing “Subterranean Homesick Blues” filmed by D A Pennebaker was much used. The clip's ironic portrayal of a performance and the seemingly random inclusion of a celebrity ( Allen Ginsberg ) in a non-performing role also became mainstays of the form. The clip has been much imitated.

Modern Era• The key innovation in the development of the modern music video

was, of course, video recording and editing processes, along with the development of a number of related effects such as Chroma-key . The advent of high-quality colour videotape recorders and portable video cameras coincided with the DIY ethos of the New Wave era and this enabled many pop acts to produce promotional videos quickly and cheaply, in comparison to the relatively high costs of using film. However, as the genre developed music video directors increasingly turned to 35mm film as the preferred medium, while others mixed film and video. By the mid-1980s releasing a music video to accompany a new single had become standard, and acts like The Jackson's sought to gain a commercial edge by creating lavish music videos with million dollar budgets; most notable from the video ‘Can You Feel It’

Modern Era of Music videos 1970s• In the UK the importance of Top of the Pops to promote a single

created an environment of innovation and competition amongst bands and record labels as the show's producers placed strict limits on the number of videos it would use - therefore a good video would increase a song's sales as viewers hoped to see the video again the following week.

• Queen 's ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ also started a whole new era for using music videos as promos.

• The early self-produced music videos by Devo , including the pioneering compilation ‘The Truth About Devolution’ directed by Chuck Statler, were also important (if somewhat subversive) developments in the evolution of the genre and these Devo video cassette releases were arguably among the first true long-form video productions.

1980s• In 1981 MTV is launched. The first video to be aired is ‘Killed The Radio Star’ by

Buggles.

• David Bowie scored his first UK number one in nearly a decade thanks to director David Mallets' eye catching promo for ‘Ashes to Ashes’

• In the early to mid 1980s , artists started to use more sophisticated effects in their videos, and added a storyline or plot to the music video. Michael Jackson was the first artist to create the concept of the short film. A short film is a music video that has a beginning, middle and end. He did this in a small way with Billie Jean, directed by Steve Barron, then in a West Side Story way with director Bob Giraldi's ‘Beat It’, but it wasn't until the 1984 release of the Thriller short film that he took the music video format to another level.

• Top of the Pops was censored its approach with the video content, so another approach was for an act to produce a promo that would be banned or edited and therefore would use the resulting controversy and publicity to promote the release. Early examples of this tactic were Duran Duran 's ‘Girls on Film’and Frankie Goes to Hollywood with ‘Relax’; directed by Bernard Rose & White lines by Grandmaster Flash

MTV• Music video would, by the mid-1980s, grow to play a central role in

popular music marketing.

• Madonna, owed a great deal of her success to the skilful construction and seductive appeal of her videos. Some academics have compared music videos to silent film, and it is suggested that stars like Madonna have (often quite deliberately) constructed an image that in many ways echoes the image of the great stars of the silent era such as Greta Garbo . Although many see MTV as the start of a ‘golden era’ of music videos and the unparalleled success of a new art form in popular culture, others see it as hastening the death of the true musical artist, because physical appeal is now critical to popularity to an unprecedented degree.

Music Videos Today• In the information technology era, music videos now approach the

popularity of the songs themselves, being sold in collections on video tape and DVD. Enthusiasts of music videos sometimes watch them muted purely for their aesthetic value. Instead of watching the video for the music, (the basis for the art form), the videos are appreciated for their visual qualities, while viewers remain uninterested in the audio portion of the performance. This is a normal sociological reaction, some say, to the increasing trend in the music business to focus on visual appeal of artists, rather than the quality of the music. Critics say that the corporate music managers, over the course of logical and calculated business decisions, have sought to capitalize on the sex appeal of females in music videos rather than in choosing less profitable musicianship-based music.

Music Video History Timeline• 1895: The “first” music video is filmed at Thomas Edison’s studio

• The oldest known film with music was made for the Kinetophone, a device developed by Thomas Edison’s lab that showed moving pictures and was also fitted out with a phonograph. In the film, its inventor, William Dickson, plays music from a popular operetta on a violin as two men dance beside him. The soundtrack was recorded separately on a wax cylinder that went missing for several decades, turned up at the Edison National Historical Site in the early 1960s and was finally reunited with the picture in 1998. Intended primarily as a test, the “Dickson Experimental Sound Film,” as the clip is known, was not released, in part because the Kinetophone never caught on with consumers.

• Early 20th century: Illustrated songs capture moviegoers’ eyes and ears

• First introduced in 1894 as a publicity stunt for marketing sheet music, illustrated songs consisted of photographic images painted in colour and projected from glass slides, sometimes interspersed with silent moving picture clips. Audience members in vaudeville houses and nickelodeons would watch these visual displays as pianists and vocalists performed corresponding music, usually before silent films started or during reel changes.

Music Video History Timeline• 1920s: Sound-on-film ushers in the era of musical shorts

• In April 1923, New York City’s Rivoli Theater presented the first motion pictures with sound-on-film, a system that synchronized movies and their soundtracks. (“The Jazz Singer,” the first full-length talkie in cinema history, would premiere in 1927 and use the same technology.) Many early sound-on-film productions featured vaudeville stars, opera singers, bands and other popular musicians; known as musical shorts, these clips were played before feature films well into the 1940s. Later, during the 1950s, musical shorts made a comeback as filler footage between television movies, which were not yet edited to fit into time slots.

• 1925: Audiences learn how to follow the bouncing ball

• A year after their animated sound-on-film series entitled “Song-Car Tunes” debuted, brothers Max and David Fleischer released a cartoon featuring a bouncing ball, which hopped over lyrics to encourage in-theatre sing-alongs. Musical cartoons with bouncing balls later became common elements of children’s television programs.

Music Video History Timeline• 1940-1946: Soundies put coins in jukeboxes across the United States

• Direct precursors to the music video, soundies were three-minute films featuring music and dance performances, designed to display on jukebox-like projection machines in bars, restaurants and other public spaces. Many of the era’s greatest talents, from jazz singers and swing dancers to chamber musicians and comedians, appeared in them. Another type of visual jukebox, known as the Scopitone, originated in France in the late 1950s and enjoyed some brief success in Europe and the United States.

• 1959: The Big Bopper coins the term “music video”

• According to some music historians, singer and songwriter Jiles Perry Richardson, who went by The Big Bopper, became the first person to use the phrase “music video” in a 1959 interview with a British magazine. (Richardson died that same year in the plane crash that also killed Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens.) The “Chantilly Lace” singer is also credited with making some of the earliest known rock videos in 1958.

Music Video History Timeline• 1960s: The Beatles marry movies and music

• Perhaps more than any other band before them, The Beatles harnessed the power of film to market their records and express themselves as artists. In addition to starring in full-length features such as “Help” and “A Hard Day’s Night,” the Fab Four recorded dozens of promotional clips—some with narratives and others composed largely of psychedelic images—that were broadcast in their native England and overseas. Many rock and roll bands of the late 1960s and 1970s followed their lead, releasing increasingly sophisticated promo films that shared the lineup with live performances on televised music variety shows.

• 1974: Australia paves the way with “Countdown” and “Sounds”

• Two weekly teen-oriented music programs premiered in Australia in 1974. Both prominently featured music videos, some of which were created especially for the shows. As “Countdown” and “Sounds” quickly earned a devoted following, the format spread to other countries around the world. In 1978, three years before MTV hit the airwaves, the American program “Video Concert Hall” began offering several hours of unhosted music videos every day on the USA Network.