History Of Music VideosTHE HISTORY OF THE MUSIC VIDEO INDUSTRY.

What Are Music Videos Actually For?o A music videos is a short film that accompanies a track or complete piece of music.

o Music videos where primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music.

Dating back to the 1930’sMusic in the 1930s was mostly just short films that went with short music tracks. These were experimented with for artist like The Beetles, David Bowie and Queen.

The earliest music videos and promos were filmed in the mid 1950’s, however before then as early as the 1920’s films by animators were accompanied by musical sources as a sort of ‘visual music’.

An example of an early music video would be St Louis Blues – Bessie Smith 1929. This blues singer appeared in a two reel short film featuring a dramatic performance that was shown in theatres until 1932.

Here are screen shots of the Bessie Smith music video/short film. AS you can see the titles have been films and the quality is very

poor however gives quite a nice, old fashioned feel.

Modern EraNow, in the modern era, music videos have developed drastically, there is now a music video for most songs, if not, at least one some from every artists album will most likely have a music video to go alongside it.

Not to mention the sheer technical side of the music videos have improved and progressed, for example, the camera work and effects are more like what is done in big feature films. These music videos make the music more entertaining when there is a moving picture image to go along side.

Timeline

1930

1940

1956

1965

1983

1985

2005

Present

Musical Films

Promotional Clips

Rise Of The TV

The Beetles

Thriller

Scream

Technology

The Norm

The big bands on the timeline are where they played around with music videos or had a huge music video release, for example Thriller.