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History of Music Videos

By Asher Budd

  • The Little Lost Child

    The Little Lost Child
    The Little Lost Child was a song written by Edward Marks and composed by Joseph Stern in 1894. In sheet form it sold over 2 million copies. A man called George Thomas who worked in a film theatre at the time approapched the men to create a series of illustrated lyric sheets to depict what the song was about. These pictures were shown alongside the printed lyrics in theatres up until 1937 and is considered a predecessor to the music video.

  • Talkies

    Talkies
    Talkies are thought of as the first real music videos. They were almost like a narrative where actors would act out situations that were implied in the lyrics, one of the early talkies were produced by Warner Brothers and were also known as 'short films'.

  • Scopitone

    Scopitone
    This was like a visual jukebox, created in France in the late 50's, many French artists including the likes of Serge Gainsbourg and Jaques Brel produced short films shown on these to accompany there songs.

  • Manny Pittson

    Manny Pittson
    Manny Pittson recorded audio and also video showing an artist lip synching to the lyrics for Canadian TV show 'Singalong Jubilee'. He then edited the audio and video together so it appeared as the the artist was singing live in the video.

  • Australian Music Television

    Australian Music Television
    Shows such as Countdown and Sounds were introduced for music video promotion in Australia due to the fact that some artists claimed it was too far a distance to travel to on tour.

  • MTV

    MTV
    On this day MTV was aired, the first music video it showed was 'Video Killed the Radio Star' by The Buggles. This is important because MTV has since gone on to become a dominant force in the music industry, arguably being the ost established station on a global scale.

  • Thriller

    Thriller
    According to the Guiness Book of World records for 2006, this is the most successful music video of all time sellin over 9 million copies. It was produced for Michael Jackson and had a duration of 13 minutes consisting mostly of a zombie chase and dance routines.

  • Animated Video

    Animated Video
    The first animated video to be shown on MTV was by Norwegian pop group 'A-Ha' for their song called 'Take Me On'. It took 16 weeks to film and included 3000 rotoscoping frames.

  • YouTube

    YouTube
    YouTube was created to show all types of videos, mainly music videos publicly, anyone can create an account on it and load up their own content. It came about as a result of the internets rise to prominance.