Research - History Of Music Videos

History of music videos

1932

Bessie Smith- St Louis Blues - This is the earliest examples of music videos that we are familiar with today. It was shown in theatres in 1932; however we are able to access music videos almost anywhere now and show much technology has changed.

1956

Tony Bennett – Stranger In Paradise - Tony’s song stranger in paradise was filmed in Hyde Park, London and was played across the UK and US television stations. However, Bennett later clamed that his music video was the very first.  This was the first example of using music videos on TV, this would lead on to create channels like MTV and Top of the pops.

1964

The Beatles – A Hard Day’s Night – The curtail moment in the development of music videos was the Beatles ‘’A hard day’s night’’, influencing the filming of music videos that all/many contemporary artists use today.

1967

The Beatles – Penny Lane

The Beatles took music videos to another level with their next video and started yisng codes and conventions that modern post productions teams know today, such as dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles and rhythmic editing.

1970

The Jackson Five – I Want You Back

The 1970s saw the music video change with more emphasis on just artists singing. This style lead to music videos to the ‘’Cross-Cutting’’ stage where the song would portray a story that accompanied the lyrics and ‘’cross-cut’’ to the artist singing it. However the key to this innovation was the editing process, dealing with more professional techniques like ‘’Chroma- Key’’.

1972

Devo - The Truth  About De-Evolution

This was early example of a self-made music video, this started the development of the music video genre ’’Experimental’’. However this music video was seen as the first ‘Long-form video production’.

1980- Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody

This style started a whole new era for music video and the introduction of ‘Top of the pops’ which would promote the music and then created a completion between artists for the first time.

1981

The Buggles – Video Killed The Radio Star

In 1981 it was the introduction of ‘MTV’ and the first video aired was ‘Video killed the radio star’’, it was a real break- through in the evolution of music videos and as you can see it was a very high budget video in which we can see more development in editing such as ‘Over-laying’. MTV was responsible for the success of the artist like Madonna as it played a central role as marketing.

1982

Michael Jackson – Thriller

Tis video was the pioneer of the ‘Storyline’ video which has a plot, almost like a mini movie. It contains sophisticated visuals and it took the music industry to another level. Now music videos were really being seen as promotion and made into high-budget productions.