Research: History of music videos

Music videos have been around for a very long time, unofficially 42 years, as there is history of music videos being created from the 19^th century. Looking back on the technology and the video quality from way before, we have come a long way from low quality videos to high quality and 4k resolution.

We will start off in 1894, where publishers of ‘sheet music, Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern, hired electrician George Thomas and a variety of performers to promote sales of their song ‘The Little Lost Child’, this was done using a magic lantern. Thomas then projected a series of still images onto a screen simultaneous to live performances. This became a popular form of entertainment known as the illustrated song, the first step toward music videos. This then set the benchmark for others to use this as a means of reimbursing technological advancements as the years flew by. Music videos will have been seen as something small and less-known to the audience during the 19^th and 20^th century.

It came to 1929 when a young black woman, by the name of Bessie Smith first appeared in a two-reel short film called Saint Louis Blues, composed by W. C. Handy. This also featured a dramatized performance of the song. Fast-forwarded to 1940 around the time Disney was a massive company (even though they still are).

Walt Disney released Fantasia, which was an animated film entirely based around incredibly famous pieces of classical music. As well as this, there were many films accompanied by moving images, especially animations.

1950-1060 saw Tony Bennett introduced to the early music video stages. He was filmed walking in Hyde Park, London, for his song “Stranger in Paradise”, of course at this stage these films weren’t necessarily available to the audience as open and freely as music videos are in our modern era of technology. By 1964, The Beatles jumped onto the bandwagon and then set the out the basic visual vocab of today’s music videos, this would later allow other artists to follow suite and help advance music videos. Two years later, the BBC created Top of the Pops, a show in which two amateur singers would come on and compete against each-other for screen time, this show created the platform for little known artists to make it in the industry and launch a singing career from then on, benefitting both the program and the contestants on there.

A year later in 1967, ‘music video’ producers started using video techniques seen in films, and borrowed them. Film effects, dramatic lighting, camera angles and rhythmic editing were seen in music videos as well as films, this allowed music videos to try and be on the same level in terms of editing techniques as films.  This is around the moment where we enter the modern era of music videos where artists such as Jackson 5, with Michael Jackson, and Queen started to use videos with some of their songs as in 1975, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody was the first to be made on video format. It was created to replace a live performance on TV, and yes, The Beatles had created videos, however, Queen were the first to create a video specifically for that song to be played on TV.

By 1980, music videos started recording with editing processor, high quality videotape recorders were common and portable video cameras allowed for many pop acts to produce promotional videos much quickly and cheaper too. In 1981, MTV launched, and with that they dropped the first ever music video, ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’, by The Buggles (This was later sampled by Will.i.am in his song Check It Out, with American artist Nicki Minaj). 

Michael Jackson, a fresh faced teenager straight from Jackson 5 after their split up, was next as his single Thriller, took the music video format to another level, a 10-minute-long video including various measures of performance. TOTP, began to censor music videos not released by them. By the mid-80s, releasing a video to accompany a song became the standard of most artists. Artists started to use more sophisticated effects, adding storylines and allowing for music videos to have a narrative based concept.

The 1990’s saw more artists use music videos as an endorsement to promote themselves. The rise of artists such as Tupac, Ashanti, Usher, Beck, Rage Against the Machine, Guns and Roses amongst many others. That was the time hip-hop and R&B became a big thing and attempted to become a mainstream genre of music. The videos that followed the songs were what created the stereotypical back drop for many hip-hop and R&B music videos. This allowed for the tie in with Dyers theory that videos will have a link to the song, which was mostly true at that stage in time. By the 2000’s music video filming techniques started to improve drastically, and allowed for other artists to come into the picture and do their thing. Artists such as Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Eminem and Coldplay all started using music videos to accompany their songs and make a name for themselves.

By doing this they also attracted record labels who were looking to sign artists. As well as in the 90’s, hip-hop and R&B artists used the same stereotypical mise-en-scene to promote their music video. Although many see MTV as the start of a ‘golden era’ of music videos, others see it as hastening the death of a true artist, placing appeal before talent, and allowing for people with less singing ability to make it in the industry over those with wonderful talent. This is a good and bad thing nowadays as it means that those without talent can attempt to use what they do have and make it in the industry.

The video format used now is so much more advanced than of a long time ago in the 20^th century, the value of music videos is so important now as it helps new artists attract fans more simply and by simply listening to it on a website such as YouTube and Vimeo, it means the audience is more likely to be engaged to see a new artist performing their song with a music video. It is very important to know about the history as it allows for me to look back on other videos from way back and try to take some ideas to add to my own plan. Understanding the history is good as everything has a past to how it came about, nothing falls from the sky, so to understand how to do good it is a necessity to evaluate how far we have come from images on a sheet of paper.