The History of Music Video ~ Jess Hitch

The history of the Music Video

1884 – Performers would promote their songs using a ‘magic lantern’, which would project still images onto a screen. This was known as the ‘illustrated song’ and was the first step towards the music video.

1926 – A series of musical short films were produces with the arrival of the ‘talkies’. These included many bands and artists.

1930 – ‘Spooney melodies’ was the first musical video series.

1940’s – One-song promotional videos were made for the ‘Panoram visual jukebox’ and often involved the band or artist playing on a movie-set or a bandstand.

1959 – Dj ‘The big bopper’ Richardson was the first to coin the phrase ‘music video’. Youth culture began appearing around this time, which helped to develop the music video because now young people were their own target audience and needed to be catered for.

1963 – One of the earliest top 40 music videos was ‘surf city’ by Jan & Dean which reached number 1 nationally in July of that year. Around this time, colour television began to become commonplace in people’s homes which was a big development in the consumption of the music video because image became everything and artists became sexual objects.

1970’s- The British TV show ‘Top of the pops’ began playing music videos. This would increase the artist/band’s sales because it would be played for weeks on end.

1981 – The launch of MTV began an era of the 24-hour music channels. MTV then launched the Music video awards in 1987. The first music video was ‘Video killed the radio star’.

2005 – Youtube launched which made viewing videos faster. It also resulted in a massive success due to the fact that their videos were being viewed constantly by millions of people.

2010 – Apple’s itunes store provided a selection of free and cheap music videos to be downloaded and played on their ipod mp4 system.