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The Little Lost Child
In 1984 Sheet music publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hired electrician George Thomas and various performers to promote sales of their song The Little Lost Child. Using a magic lantern, Thomas projected a series of still images on a screen simultaneous to live performances. This would become a popular form of entertainment known as the illustrated song, the first step toward music video. -
Talkies
n 1926, with the arrival of "talkies" many musical short films were produced. Vitaphone shorts (produced by Warner Bros.) featured many bands, vocalists and dancers. Animation artist Max Fleischer introduced a series of sing-along short cartoons called Screen Songs, which invited audiences to sing along to popular songs by "following the bouncing ball", which is similar to a modern karaoke machine. -
Bessie Smith
Blues singer Bessie Smith appeared in a two-reel short film called St. Louis Blues (1929) featuring a dramatized performance of the hit song. Numerous other musicians appeared in short musical subjects during this period. -
Soundies
Soundies, produced and released from 1940-1947, were musical films that often included short dance sequences, similar to later music videos. In the mid-1940s, musician Louis Jordan made short films for his songs, some of which were spliced together into a feature film Lookout Sister. These films were, according to music historian Donald Clarke, the "ancestors" of music video. -
Early music videos
In his autobiography, Tony Bennett claims to have created "...the first music video" when he was filmed walking along the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London in 1956. The clip was sent to UK and US television stations and aired on shows including Dick Clark's American Bandstand. The oldest example of a promotional music video with similarities to more abstract, modern videos seems to be "Dáme si do bytu" ("Let's get to the apartment") created in 1958 and directed by Ladislav Rychman. -
1960–1973: Promotional clips
In 1961, for the Canadian show Singalong Jubilee, Manny Pittson began pre-recording the music audio, went on-location and taped various visuals with the musicians lip-synching, then edited the audio and video together. Most music numbers were taped in-studio on stage, and the location shoot "videos" were to add variety. In 1964, Kenneth Anger's experimental short film, Scorpio Rising used popular songs instead of dialog. -
The Beatles
In 1964, The Beatles starred in their first feature film A Hard Day's Night, directed by Richard Lester. Shot in black-and-white and presented as a mock documentary, it interspersed comedic and dialogue sequences with musical tones. The musical sequences furnished basic templates on which countless subsequent music videos were modeled. It was the direct model for the successful US TV series The Monkees (1966–1968) which similarly consisted of film segments. -
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones appeared in many promotional clips for their songs in the 1960s. In 1966, Peter Whitehead directed two promo clips for their single "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow?" In 1967, Whitehead directed a plot clip colour promo clip for the Stones single "We Love You", which first aired in August 1967. This clip featured sped-up footage of the group recording in the studio. -
Beginnings of Music TV
The Australian TV shows Countdown and Sounds, both of which premiered in 1974, were significant in developing and popularizing the music video genre in Australia and other countries, and in establishing the importance of music video clips as a means of promoting both emerging acts and new releases by established acts. In early 1974, former radio DJ Graham Webb launched a weekly teen-oriented TV music show which screened on Sydney's ATN-7 on Saturday mornings; this was renamed Sounds Unlimited. -
Countdown - MTV
Countdown talent coordinator Ian "Molly" Meldrum and producer Michael Shrimpton quickly realized that "film clips" were becoming an important new commodity in music marketing. They relocated to the UK after having success in Australia creating MTV and playing The Buggles' "Video Killed The Radio Star" as the first music video aired in 1981. -
Rise of the Music Video
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, Duran Duran and Madonna, owed a great deal of their success to the skillful construction and seductive appeal of their videos. -
Michael Jackson's "Thriller"
In 1983, the most successful, influential and iconic music video of all time was released: the nearly 14-minute-long video for Michael Jackson's song "Thriller", directed by John Landis. The video set new standards for production, having cost US $800,000 to film. The video for "Thriller", along with earlier videos by Jackson for his songs "Billie Jean" and "Beat It", were instrumental in getting music videos by African American artists played on MTV. -
Accessibility
Two key innovations in the development of the modern music video were the development of relatively inexpensive and easy-to-use video recording and editing equipment, and the development of visual effects created with techniques such as image compositing. The advent of high-quality color videotape recorders and portable video cameras coincided with the DIY ethos of the new wave era,[citation needed] enabling many pop acts to produce promotional videos quickly and cheaply. -
Rise of the Directors
In November 1992, MTV began listing directors with the artist and song credits, reflecting the fact that music videos had increasingly become an auteur's medium. Directors such as Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Floria Sigismondi, Stéphane Sednaoui, Mark Romanek and Hype Williams all got their start around this time; all brought a unique vision and style to the videos they directed. -
The internet becomes video friendly
The website iFilm, which hosted short videos, including music videos, launched its service in 1997. Napster, a peer-to-peer file sharing service which ran between 1999 and 2001, enabled users to share video files, including those for music videos. By the mid-2000s, MTV and many of its sister channels had largely abandoned showing music videos in favor of reality television shows, which were more popular with its audiences, and which MTV had itself helped to pioneer with the show The Real World. -
Youtube launches
2005 saw the launch of the website YouTube, which made the viewing of online video much faster and easier; Google Videos, Yahoo! Video, Facebook and MySpace's video functionality, use similar technology. Such websites had a profound effect on the viewing of music videos; some artists began to see success as a result of videos seen mostly or entirely online. The band OK Go may exemplify this trend, having achieved fame through the videos for their songs, "A Million Ways" in 2005.
