History of Music Videos

A music video is a short piece of film which goes along side a piece of music, usually a song, and is used to represent the song and artist. In modern times, music videos are mainly used as a marketing tool to advertise the song to their target audience in order to increase the sales and views of the song and music video.

In the early 1900s music scores began to be played alongside scenes in movies, and this is where the popularity for music videos began. An example of this is Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, which had battle scenes which had been choreographed to a score by Sergei Prokofiev, this has been seen by some as the first ever music video.
But this basic idea of a music video could be found even early in history, as early as 1911 with Alexander Scriabin's symphony Prometheus - Poem of Fire for orchestra and 'light organ'. In addition, in the 1920s Oskar Fischingers animated films were accompanied by orchestra scores, which could be considered as an early interpretation of a music video.
In the late 1920s Bessie Smith appeared in a two-reel short film called Saint Louis Blues which featured a dramatic performance to the hit song.

In the 1940s another early idea of music videos could be seen in one-song films called 'Soundies' , these were short musical films, usually about three minutes long, they usually just showed a band on a movie-stand bandstand. Soundies were usually of Jazz musicians but there were also some for comedians, torch singers and dancers.

The very first musical films made for television were called the Snader Telescriptions. They were used for TV fillers and were mainly of conventional pop performers, but some were also made for blues, jazz and country performers.
In the 1960s a new kind of technology from France came around, as the Aeriel photography adapted to create a modern visual dukebox, known as the Scopitone. These mainly showed clips of the band just playing their instruments, but when it became more popular in the US more vivid quality.

Modern music videos also started in the 60s with The Beatles first major motion picture, A Hard Day's Night, in 1964, this included musical segments which are similar of music videos today. Later that year they then began filming short promotional films for their songs which were aired on TV. This then became a common thing for performers to do as many others, such as The Beach Boys, began doing this and filming their own promotional films.

The first music video of the modern era was in 1979 by Michael Nesmith who made short films for Saturday Night Live. Two years later he released Elephant Parts which was the first video album and also the first music video to win a Grammy.

Due to the Information Technology era starting in the 1990s music videos were becoming as popular as the songs themselves. It also became very easy to distribute these music videos over the Internet, this lead to many fan created videos being created in the late 90s and into the current century.

MTV was the first TV channel with the main purpose of just airing music videos it was set up by a spin-off company of the American Express Group, and it was an experimental satellite channel broadcasting 24 hours of music videos. The first music video to ever appear on MTV was Video Killed the Radio Star. MTV also helped music progress throughout the years by eventually showing music videos containing black artists and dancers.

 

In the present day, music videos are a very important part of today's society, and artists who don't have music videos are almost nonexistent now. Artists use msuic videos to entertain their target audience and to allow the audience to gain a relationship with them. There are now hundreds of music channels all showing different genres of music, and it is now extremelly easy for the public to gain access to music videos with the help of the Internet and websites such as Youtube.