History of the Music Video

The first so called music video came around in 1894 but not in the form that we know them as today.When Edward B. Masen and Joe Stern thought of a perfect way to promote the sales of their song 'The Little Lost Child' they played the music live to a projection of still images and a rather blurry animation of kittens. This was the first so called 'Music video' and with the arrival of the first sound films in 1926 more music videos or short musical films started to appear.In 1926 - 1930 vitaphone shorts ( produced by Warner Bros) made musical short films .The vidoes were often featured bands, vocalists or dancers etc. Alot more like the music videos we are acustomed to seeing today.Walt Disney soon began to base short animated cartoons around music (his silly symphonies).But many of the so called music videos were only short promotinal peices

In 1960–1967 different types of 'visual jukeboxes' started to appear all over the world offering the first world wide music video entertainment system.

Later manny Pittson began to pre-record the music audio and went on set getting th artists to lip sync so that he could merge the two together.Most music vidoes were taken of them on stage or in the studio and shoots taken at different locations were to add a veriety to this.

One of the first so called 'performance clips' was by by the pop ban The Animals making a promotional film of their hit song 'House of the Rising Sun'.It was full color and of a good quality compared to what had been seen before on a music video.It contained the band lip-syncing to the song as the moved around the specialy built stage.

In 1967–1973 the promotional video became even more popular with people such as Bob Dlyan broke away from the traditional style of the performance or the narrative and instead had himself silently holding up keys words of the songs lyrics in an back alley way.This was filmed by D. A. Pennebaker and featured in Pennebaker's Dylan film documentary Don't Look Back.

The first Television programe in the UK to play music videos was the long running BBC show Top Of The Pops or TOTP for short in the 1970s.Althought the BBC placed strict restrictions on playing 'outsourced' videos so it was perfect for publacity as if people liked the song they heard and the video they saw they would go out and buy it in the hope that the TOTP would play it again.

1981-1991 was when the music video first hit the mainstream with the USAs channel MTV played music videos for 24 hours a day.By the mid-1980's the music video become a popular and essential part in promoting music.With the invention of better and easier ways of recording the amount of types, styles and vidoes for music just kept growing support by the likes of Madonna and Adam and the Ants.

1992-2004 directors star to realise that there is room for creativity in the music video scene and begin to experiment with music videos and form the begining of the auteur's medium.MTV also started to expand to a more world wide scale bringin out more channels such as MTV India, MTV Latin America and even MTV2 which was design to show more alternative and older videos.

2005 - preasent the internet started to have videos appearing on them and with the videos so did the music videos.The first on the net were from people who recorded them directly off the TV and changed the format to make the quality better on the internet comming mainly from IRC based web groups.iFilm soon came along in 1997 which was a website that contained short videos including music videos. Napster was around during 1999-2001 but as it was a file sharing wite it was soon taken down but was used to help spread music vidoes.

2005 saw tha arrival of YouTube, one of the worlds biggest user video uploaded content site.IOnternet sites such as YouTube are vital in promotions of music videos as they are fast,simple and easy to use often being spread 'viraly'. Allowing people to upload videos also gives people the oppertunity of posting their version or even their own songs giving themself some free promotion which can help them on the road to stardom.