History of the Music Video

A music video is a short film including a song, produced to promote the artist and the single. Music videos use a wide range of styles of film making techniques, such as animation, live action filming, documentaries, and abstract film. Some music videos mix different styles, such as animation and live action. A lot of music videos do not interpret images from the song's lyrics, making it less literal than expected. Usually in music videos artists lip sync and shot the video is shot separately beforehand, both are then edited together to make the music video. An example of this was The Animals's 1964 hit, House Of The Rising Sun. This high-quality colour clip was filmed in a studio on a specially-built set, with the group lip-synching.
 Supposedly music videos started on the BBC’s Top of the Pops in November 1975. The past decades of music video, whether seen on TV, in clubs or on the Internet, have presented numerous art works expressing the street life and fantasy lives of modern sub-cultures. Even though there were no home video reorders until the late 70s/early 80s, broadcasters were recording the TV programme on big 2 inch video tapes. In the 80's this is when music videos first started appearing on TV outside of Top of the Pops. Also there was another music programme on TV called The Old Grey Whistle Test which produced a number of videos made especially for the program throughout the 70s and early 80s.
  Throughout this period, directors and the acts they worked with began to explore and expand the form and style of the genre, using more sophisticated effects in their videos, mixing film and video, and adding a storyline to the music video.  In the late 1950s the Scopitone, a visual jukebox, was invented in France and short films were produced by many French artists.
   Before music videos were created, from 1965, The Beatles made short films which included some of their songs, this was because they were too famous so they couldn't perform everywhere were they were wanted, and it was easier for people to see them that way. They ranged from black and white in the earlier years, to colour when TV colour became popular. They then went onto releasing the single I am The Walrus which was the closest video they made to a music vide, also they were featured in a film A Hard Days Night which was full of comedy, dialogue and music sequences. Queen were also one of the first bands to record a music video, as they were not able to appear on Top of the Pops as they were on tour. They worked over two days and spent £4,000 and asked Bruce Gowers to shoot their latest single, Bohemian Rhapsody, on the relatively new medium of video tape, using editing. Many "song films" often referred to as "filmed inserts" at that time were produced by UK artists, so they could be screened on TV when the bands were not available to appear live
  The monochrome 1966 clip for Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues filmed by D.A. Pennebaker was featured in Pennebaker's Dylan film documentary Don't Look Back. In 1981 the American music programme, MTV began a 24 hour day of music, first launching the single 'Video Killed The Radio Star'. In 1983, one of the most successful and influential music video of all time was the video for Michael Jackson's single, Thriller. Because it was nearly 14 minutes long, it cost $500,000 to film. In 1985, MTV launched the channel VH1, featuring softer music, and meant to cater to an older demographic than MTV. In 1988, the MTV show Yo! MTV Raps debuted, the show helped to bring hip hop music to a mass audience for the first time.
  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 2005 a video viewing site, YouTube was launched making the viewing of online video faster and easier, other sites that also do this are Google Videos, Yahoo! Video, Facebook and Myspace which uses similar technology. Because some of the videos were getting a huge amount of views, artists also use this to promote themselves and their songs.
  Unofficial, fan-made music videos are typically made by synchronizing existing footage from other sources, such as television series or movies, with the song. With the advent of easy distribution over the internet and cheap video-editing software, fan-created videos started to become popular in the late 1990's.