The history of music videos

Conor Murray
A2 Media

The history of music videos

A music video is a short piece of film, accompanying and played alongside a musical track. They are used primarily to promote musical tracks. Despite music having originated from many decades ago, music videos came into fashion in the 1980’s for artistic promotional purposes. Prior to the 80’s, these products were not referred to as music videos, they were known as promo videos or song clips. They can tell a story by developing a narrative, feature the artists playing the specified song or be an abstract piece that doesn’t necessarily contain any comparison to the featured music track. They can also interweave different video styles, such as animation and video. Music videos are also regularly formulated around the origins of the lyrics to the song, to give it more meaning, making it more iconic. 1926 saw the introduction of the ‘Talkies’, and following, many musical short films. Warner Bros produced short films by something called Vitaphone. Vitaphone was a music and film system, used predominantly for feature films, but Warner Bros made around 1,000 short films with this device featuring dancers, vocalists and bands.
Vitaphone Short:

 The use of the Vitaphone however, had eroded by the 1960’s, in which a visual jukebox was invented in France. Following this many French musical artists used videos alongside their songs. This machine quickly spread to other countries, and encouraged the inventions of the Color-Sonic in the USA and the Cinebox in Italy, both of which were similar to the musical jukebox. The first lip-synched music film was produced by the artist Manny Pittson in 1961. 1964 saw the Beatles star in their own feature film ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, this was filmed in black and white and carried a documentary crossed with comedic style of shooting, it also featured many songs from their album, which they performed and lip-synched with on the film.


Hard Days Night – The Beatles

They were the first artists to attempt anything like this and this film set out a foundation for many other artists to work around. 1965 saw the Beatles change history again with their second feature film ‘Help!’, filmed in colour. The title track sequence was one of the first music incorporated films to feature lip-synching, rhythmic cross-cutting, contrasting long shots, close ups and a vast array of camera angles. The Beatles then began to make promotional clips, so they could promote their songs on TV shows without having to make an appearance. In 1966, the Kinks produced the first ‘plot based’ music video to their song ‘Dead End Street’ which was a miniature comic feature. Nearly every big time artist starting engaging in developing promotional music videos for their tracks and in the 1980’s America launched the TV programme MTV, which was a 24 hour programme playing mostly music videos. This lead to music videos rising up to the mainstream, but it really kicked off after Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video released in 1983, resulting in being one of the most iconic and successful music videos of all time.

Michael Jackson – Thriller

 In 1992 MTV started assigning directors to music videos reflecting the fact that these productions had been received extremely well by the public. Through the 1990’s music videos were being produced by a huge variety of artists such as Pulp, Oasis, Madonna, The Verve and Massive Attack. A huge boost to this area of the music industry developed in 2005 in the form of Youtube.  This was the first time consumers could easily access music videos without having to wait lengthy periods for buffering. Within the present era, Youtube still remains the primary source for the viewing of music videos, it offers access to any band anywhere around the world. Music videos have developed greatly in the sense of production, editing, mise en scene, and cinematography.

Arctic Monkeys – Why’d You only call me when your high?

This video is a great example of the developments in cinematography, editing, mise en scene and diegetic sound use as it reflects the urban culture of today's age, and successfully represents the targeted audience. There are a wide variety of visual effects in this video, that would not have been used years prior to this. It also, like many of recent music videos, features a prologue to the video to develop the narrative for the viewer which is becoming more of a typical feature in music videos.