History Of Music Videos

 Music videos are commonly known as short movies that compliment a song or a piece of music. It is used to promote singles and albums.

In 9174 Christian Metz’s wrote a book called Language and Cinema. This book explained that in every genre it goes through the four stages; Experimental, classic, parody and deconstruction.

The ‘Scopitone’ was introduced in the 1950s in france. This was a jukebox which had a small screen that showed performances. Serge Gainsbourg, French artist, was the very firt singer to make a short sequence which went along with their songs.

“A Hard Days Night”(1964)- The Beatles, is the first black and white music movie, to ever experiment with putting their songs into a film. This opened up a whole new music video industry, Their single ‘I Should of known better’ was the first ever music video to film from 4 different angles and then go on to editing them together. Companies still use this method while making music video. Queen was the seconds band to explore music videos with their single ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ this was a success as it meant they the band didn’t have to travel around the world from place to place preforming so that fans could hear and see the band play. They experimented with a range of different video effects to engage the audience’s attention, helping their fan base to increase. They used Colour filter, Lights, Zoom, Fade, Two Shots and Lenses Flair.

In the 1970s in the uk ‘top of the pop’ (iconic music television programme made by the BBC ) decided to promote singles by allowing the audience to watch the videos this created competitions amongst artists and record labels forcing them to make good videos to go along with their songs so that they would be played on ‘top of the pop’.

In 1981 MTV was broadcasted, so that viewers could watch the most popular music videos 24 hours. This was a way to increase the music marketing profits. The first Music video to be aired was ‘Video killed the radio star’- Buggles. Artists started testing the music video industry be adding story lines to their videos and making it fit in with the songs, they also slowed down with the special effects to make their videos look more sophisticated. Michael Jackson was the very first artist to try the short film music video out with ‘Billie Jean’. MTV was a very important part in the music industry as it promoted artists from around the world. This then became a competition for the artist to make the best music video they possibly could, so that it would get played on MTV for the viewer to see.

In 1995  ‘Scream’ sang by Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson is the most expensive music video  ever to be made, it cost them $7 million. In 2003 ‘Youtube’ was introduced this allowed people to watch any music videos they wanted and whenever they wanted. It also allowed the public to upload their own videos.