The History of the Music Video

The history of the music video

1925-1959:

With the arrival of the sound films and talkies in 1926, many musical short films were produced. Vita phone shorts (1926–30), which were produced by Warner Bros, featured many bands, vocalists and dancers. The series entitled Spooney Melodies was the first true musical video series. The shorts were typically about six minutes long, and featured animations and backgrounds combined with film of the performer singing the song.
Early 1930s cartoons featured popular musicians performing their hit songs on-camera in live-action segments during the cartoons.
The early animated films by Walt Disney were built around music. The Warner Brothers cartoons, even today billed as Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, were initially created around specific songs from Warner Brother’s musical films. Warner Brothers also produced the cartoon "Three Pigs in a Polka", set to Johannes Brahms' Hungarian Dances. Live action musical shorts, featuring such popular performers as Cab Calloway, were also viewed in theatres. Numerous musicians appeared in short musical subjects during this period. Later, in the mid-1940s, musician Louis Jordan made short films for his songs, some of which were spliced together to create a feature film Lookout Sister.
Another early form of music video were one-song films called ‘Promotional Clips’ made in the 1940s for the Panoram visual jukebox (played music while showing a synchronized visual image). Before the Soundie, even dramatic movies typically had a musical interval, but the Soundie made ‘the music the star’ and virtually all the named jazz performers appeared in Soundie shorts. The Panoram jukebox with eight three-minute Soundies was popular in taverns and night spots, but became less popular during World War II.
Musical films were another important predecessor to the music video, and several well-known music videos have imitated the style of classic Hollywood musicals from the 1930s to the 1950s. One of the best-known examples is Madonna's 1985 video for ‘Material Girl’ which was closely modeled on Jack Cole's staging of ‘Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend’. Several of Michael Jackson's videos show the influence of the dance sequences in classic Hollywood musicals, including the landmark John Landis clip for ‘Thriller’ which at the time was the most expensive music video ever made.
In 1956, ‘Petrushka’ directed by John David Wilson went on air as part of the Sol Hurok Music Hour on NBC. Igor Stravinsky conducted a live orchestra for the recording of the event.
In 1957, Tony Bennett was filmed walking along The Serpentine in Hyde Park, London as his recording of ‘Stranger in Paradise’ played. This film was distributed to and played by UK and US television stations. Richardson was the first to take the phrase ‘music video’ and put it to use in 1959.

1960–1967:

In the late 1950’s 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 quickly spread to other countries where other similar machines were created such as the italian ‘Cinebox’ and the American ‘Colour-Sonic’.

1967–1973:

The colour promotional clips for "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", made in early 1967 and directed by Peter Goldman took the promotional film format to a new level. They used techniques borrowed from underground and avant garde film, including reversed film and slow motion, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles and color filtering added in post-production.
The long-running British TV show Top of the Pops began playing music videos in the late 1970s, although the BBC placed strict limits on the number of 'outsourced' videos TOTP could use. Therefore a good video would increase a song's sales as viewers hoped to see it again the following week.

1974–1980

In 1975, the band Queen ordered Bruce Gowers to make a promo video for their new single "Bohemian Rhapsody" to show it in Top Of The Pops; this is also notable for being entirely shot and edited on videotape. This was the first ever music video (as they are today) which took three hours of filming and £3,500 to create.

1981–1990:

In 1981, the U.S. video channel MTV launched, airing "Video Killed the Radio Star" and beginning an era of 24-hour-a-day music on television. With this new outlet for material, the music video would, by the mid-1980s, grow to play a central role in popular music marketing. Many important acts of this period, most notably Adam and the Ants, and Madonna, owed a great deal of their success to the skillful construction and seductive appeal of their videos.
Originally MTV only had 200 videos to show and so it got repetitive and relied on adverts to space out the songs.

Will Gough