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History of the Music Video

Music videos did not start with The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, any more than it started with MTV, VH1 or YouTube. In fact, the story of the music video begins well over a century ago.

It was American electrician/photographer George Thomas who was the first to put images to music. His ‘illustrated song’ – a series of still images printed onto glass slides, coloured in by hand and projected onto a screen alongside a live musical performance – made song-book publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern’s number, The Little Lost Child, a massive hit back in the music halls of 1894.

Almost thirty years later was the era of the talkies, and musical films were taking off dramatically. 'Spooney Melodies' was a series of five musical shorts produced by Warner Brothers between 1930 and 1931 – films that mixed art-deco animation and live-action footage and aimed to showcase the popular tunes of the day. They were about six minutes and only one of them, Crying’ For The Carolines, is known to have survived.

In the late 1950s, a company called Cameca in Courbevoie, France, came up with the Scopitone, a jukebox that incorporated a 16mm film component. Soon the Italians were following suit with the Cinebox, which emigrated to the USA with the Scopitone in the 1960s, where the Cinebox became the Cinejukebox and Francis Ford Coppolla invested in the Scopitone. The craze for video jukeboxes had fizzled out by 1967, but by then the enthusiasm for music videos was unstoppable. 

It was TV that truly embraced the music video. In the mid-1970's, along side the UK's 'Top of the Pops', Australian TV shows 'Countdown' and 'Sounds' were popularising the genre. Sounds presenter and DJ Graham Webb hired new director Russell Mulcahy to shoot videos for songs he wanted to feature on his show but that didn’t already have their own promo clips. Mulchay went on create the video for The Buggles’ Video Killed The Radio Star – which became, in 1981, the first music video ever to be played on MTV.

Since the 1980s, round-the-clock music video channels have become the norm – starting with MTV, VH1 etc. – and in 1984, MTV launched their Music Awards and then their VMA's. Directors grew ambitious – John Landis’ video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller cost a staggering half a million dollars to make and opened the way for African-American artists in the music video scene.

Although MTV is now more focused on reality shows than music, the Internet has picked up where TV has declined, and, since 2005, YouTube is now the first port of call for anybody searching for a music video. The video for Lady GaGa’s, Bad Romance became, in 2010, the most-viewed video not only on YouTube, but on the entire Internet. Because of new media technologies, such as smartphones, more people have the ability to watch music videos anywhere at anytime meaning the popularity of the music video has increased rapidly. 180 years old and the music video is still going from strength-to-strength.

Coursework Brief

1.   A promotion package for the release of an album, to include a music promo video, together with two of the following three options:
 

- A website homepage for the band;

- A cover for its release as part of a digipak (CD/DVD package);

- A magazine advertisement for the digipak (CD/DVD package).