In 1894 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'.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.
Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings. Although the origins of music videos go back much further, they gained popularity and reached a mass audience in the 1980s, when MTV based their format around the medium, and later with the launch of VH1. Now there are around 20 different music channels all constantly showing endless music videos from many genres of music.
In 1894 when sheet music publishers still ran the music business, Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern contacted various performers to promote sales of their song’ The Little Lost Child’. Thomas projected a series of still images on a screen simultaneously with live performances in what became a popular form of entertainment known as the illustrated song. This is thought to have been the first music video. Even today many music videos follow the format of live performances mixed with other images.
According to the Internet Accuracy Project, disk jockey-singer J. P. ‘The Big Bopper’ Richardson was the first to coin the phrase ‘music video’ in 1959. It is no coincidence that the rise of popular music was tied with the rise of television, as the format allowed for many rising stars to be exposed that previously would have been passed over by Hollywood.
In 1965, The Beatles began making promotional clips (then known as "filmed inserts") to broadcast in other countries (mainly the USA) so they could promote their record releases without having to make in-person appearances. On November 23, 1965 at Twickenham Film Studios, The Beatles videotaped 10 black & white promo films. The colour promotional clips for ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ made in early 1967 took the promotional film format to a new level. They used techniques borrowed from underground and avant garde film, including reversed film and slow motion, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles and color filtering added in post-production. This highlighted the fact that these videos were impossible for the group to perform live, their psychedelic mini-films showed the songs in an artistic way rather than trying to create a basic performance that other videos did at the time.
Between 1967 and 1973 promotional clips grew in importance and big bands such as The Rolling Stones and The Who were all making promotional music videos, one of the most memorable being Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’.
In 1981, the U.S. MTV launched, airing the aptly named "Video Killed the Radio Star" and began 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. Many important acts of this period such as Adam and the Ants and Madonna owed a great deal of their success to the appeal of their videos. In this period, directors and the acts they worked with began to explore and expand the form and style of the genre, using more complex effects in their videos, mixing film and video, and adding a storyline or plot to the music video. Occasionally videos did not show the artist at all which was unconventional an example being David Bowie and Queen’s ‘Under Pressure’.
In 1983, the most successful and influential music video of all time was released - the 14-minute-long video for Michael Jackson's song ‘Thriller’. The video set new standards for production, having cost $500,000 to make. That video, along with earlier videos by Michael Jackson for his songs "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" were also was highly influential in getting music videos by African American artists played on MTV. In 1984, MTV also launched the MTV Video Music Awards, an annual awards event that would come to underscore MTV's importance in the music industry.
In 1985 the music video developed further with The Dire Straits song ‘Money for Nothing’ made pioneering use of computer animation, and helped make the song an international hit. Ironically, the song itself was a wry comment on the music-video phenomenon, sung from the point of view character both drawn to and repelled by the outlandish images and personalities that appeared on MTV. In 1986, Peter Gabriel's song ‘Sledgehammer’ used special effects and animation techniques which helped the song become a phenomenal success and win nine MTV Video Music Awards.
In 1992, MTV began listing directors with the artist and song credits. Directors such as Spike Jonze and Mark Romanek all got their start around this time and all brought a unique vision and style to the videos they directed.
2005 saw the release of the website YouTube, which made the viewing of online video faster and easier. MySpace followed with online videos as well in 2007. 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 is a key example of this trend, having achieved fame through the video for their song ‘Here It Goes Again’ in 2006, which first became well-known online. Artists like Soulja Boy also achieved some level of fame primarily through videos released only online.
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