History of the music video BY JOSEPH SHEPHERD

. What is Music video? Wikipedia defines a music as a short film or video that accompanies a complete piece of music, most commonly a song . Modern music videos were primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings

An Early example of a music video

The earliest example I could find was St Louis Blue’s – Bessie Smith 1929 Blues singer Bessie Smith appeared in a two-reel short film called Saint Louis Blues ( 1929 ) featuring a dramatized performance of the hit song. It was shown in theatres until 1932.

1950’s and 60’s developments

In 1956 Tony Bennett was filmed walking along The Serpentine in Hyde Park, London as his recording of Stranger in played, this film was distributed to and played by UK and US television stations, leading Bennett to later claim he made the first music video. According to the Internet Accuracy Project , disk jockey -singer J.P ”The Big Bopper”; Richardson (d. 1959) was the first to coin the phrase “rock video” Around 1960 the Scopitone , a visual jukebox, was invented in France and short films were produced by many French artists, such as Serge Gainsbourg , Françoise Hardy and Jacques Dutronc to accompany their songs. Its use spread to other countries and similar machines such as the Cinebox in Italy and Color-Sonic in the USA were patented.

1950’s and 60’s cont…

The defining work in the development of the modern music video was The Beatles ' first major motion picture, A Hard Day's Night in 1964 , directed by Richard Lester . The musical segments in this film arguably set out the basic visual vocabulary of today's music videos, influencing a vast number of contemporary musicians, and countless subsequent pop and rock group music videos. Although unashamedly based on A Hard Day's Night , the hugely popular American TV series The Monkees was another important influence on the development of the music video genre, with each episode including a number of specially-made film segments that were created to accompany the various Monkees songs used in the series. The Beatles took the genre to new heights with their groundbreaking films for Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane made in early 1967 , which used techniques borrowed from underground and avant garde film, such as reversed film effects, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles and rhythmic editing. Created at the height of the psychedelic music period, these two landmark films are among the very first purpose-made concept videos that attempt to show the song in an artful manner, rather than just creating a film of an idealized performance

Modern Era The key innovation in the development of the modern music video was video recording and editing processes, along with the development of a number of related effects such as chroma-key. The advent of high-quality color videotape recorders and portable video cameras coincided with the DIY ethos of the New Wave era and this enabled many pop acts to produce promotional videos quickly and cheaply, in comparison to the relatively high costs of using film. However, as the genre developed music video directors increasingly turned to 35mm film as the preferred medium, while others mixed film and video. By the mid-1980s releasing a music video to accompany a new single had become standard, and acts like The Jackson's sought to gain a commercial edge by creating lavish music videos with million dollar budgets; most notable with the video for ”Can You Feel It”

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Modern Era of Music Video 1970’s In the UK the importance of Top of the Pops to promote a single created an environment of innovation and competition amongst bands and record labels as the show's producers placed strict limits on the number of videos it would use - therefore a good video would increase a song's sales as viewers hoped to see the video again the following week. Queen 's Bohemian Rhapsody also started a whole new era for using music videos as promos. American band Devo were one of the first to create the early self-produced music videos, including the pioneering compilation “The Truth About Devolution”; directed by Chuck Statler, were also important (if somewhat subversive) developments in the evolution of the genre and these Devo video cassette releases were arguably among the first true long-form video productions.

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1980’s1981- MTV is launched, the first video to be aired is Buggles ‘Video killed the Radio Star’, David Bowie scored his first UK number one in nearly a decade thanks to director David Mallets' eye catching promo for” Ashes to Ashes”. In the early to mid-1980s, artists started to use more Jackson was the first artist to create the concept of the short film. A short film is a music sophisticated effects in their videos, and added a storyline or plot to the music video. Michael video that has a beginning, middle and end. He did this in a small way with Billie Jean, directed by Steve Barron, then in a West Side Story style with director Bob Giraldi's Beat It, but it wasn't until the 1984 release of the Thriller short film that he took the music video format to another level. Top of the Pops was censorious in its approach to video content, so another approach was for an act to produce a promo that would be banned or edited and so use the resulting controversy and publicity to promote the release. Early examples of this tactic were Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film and Frankie Goes to Hollywood with;”Relax” directed by Bernard Rose & “White lines” by Grandmaster FlashMTV Music videos would, by the mid-1980s, grow to play a central role in popular music marketing. Madonna , owed a great deal of her success to the skillful construction and seductive appeal of her videos. Some academics have compared music videos to silent film, and it is suggested that stars like Madonna have (often quite deliberately) constructed an image that in many ways echoes the image of the great stars of the silent era such as Greta Garbo . Although many see MTV as the start of a “golden era” of music videos and the unparalleled success of a new art form in popular culture, others see it as hastening the death of the true musical artist, because physical appeal is now critical to popularity to an unprecedented degree. Video killed the radio

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Music Videos Today In the information technology era, music videos now approach the popularity of the songs themselves, being sold in collections on video tape and DVD. Enthusiasts of music videos sometimes watch them muted purely for their aesthetic value. Instead of watching the video for the music, (the basis for the artform), the videos are appreciated for their visual qualities, while viewers remain uninterested in the audio portion of the performance. This is a normal sociological reaction, some say, to the increasing trend in the music business to focus on visual appeal of artists, rather than the quality of the music. Critics say that the corporate music managers, over the course of logical and calculated business decisions, have sought to capitalize on the sex appeal of females in music videos rather than in choosing less profitable musicianship-based music.

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