The History Of The Music Video

Moving Images and sound had been around separately since the early 1900s but only started to merge together in the year of 1922 when sound was dubbed over the top of a video, these video clips were known as 'talkies'.

This then developed in the 1950s when the use of musical films became increasingly popular.  These were often large dance performances with various music placed over the top.  Around the same time Elvis began to release films to his own music.  These films were often aimed at rebelling teenagers

In the year of 1967, The television programme 'Top of the Pops' first started to air videos when artists were unable to attend the studio.  An example of this was the promo video for 'Strawberry Fields' by 'The Beatles'.  This video featured the band supposedly 'larking around' in a field.

'Bohemian Rapsody' is considered as the first real music video, produced in 1975 it only cost £3000 which is a mere shadow of the majority of videos made today.  The reason why they decided to produce a music video was because the song was so hard to perform live.

In 1977 the first television programme was created which only featured music videos, the station was named 'Popclips' and was a huge success, especially with the younger generation.

In 1981 MTV made its first appearence on the television and it's first song to show was 'Video Killed the Radio Star'.  They were critiscised heavily with people saying that the music video would never last, and they only had 200 videos to circulate over the channel.  The music video gres in strength though with more and more artists creating them and soon MTV started to take off.

The music video kept increasing in popularity and by 1985 it had started to take the transformation from an artistic way to tell the song, to an industrial way to sell records and promote the music.

1987 was when MTV-europe was launched. It was broadcasted to 1.6 millions homes, and by 1988 it had achieved over 3.5 million subscribers. The helped promote music videos to a worldwide audience.

From 1989 to 1991, Madonna's music videos; Express yourself, Vouge and Justify My Love, win the best director award three years in a row.

MTV moves to more television based programs and series, denouncing themseves as just a music channel. The Real World, a fly-on-the-wall documentry based in New York was MTV's first TV series.

1994 VH1 was launched in the UK. As more televison producers realised there is money to be made from Music Video Channels.

MTV has gone on to make more specifed channels, such as MTV Dance.