Music Video History

Music video History.

Music video have began in their simplest forms since the 1890’s. The first simple form of a music video, was known as Illustrated songs, which the first one was a sheet of music created by Edward B.Marks and Joe Stern, who hired George Thomas, to create a collection of still images during the live performances of the song. This could be considered the first ‘version’ of music video or a predecessor. The next major step was in the late 1920’s of ‘talkies’, and short musical films, which would last around six minutes, and usually had either cartoons and animations or the performers acting. After the emergence of technology of film and sound, many producers began to move actual theatre productions and turn them in to Musical films, the era considered to be most notable for these was from the 1930’s to 1960’s when they were most popular, notable titles such as  ‘Singing in the rain’ were the highlight of these.

Post  1960 was the beginning of a turning point for film, and the emergence of more controversial musical films such as ‘West Side story’, of which about two people of different religion’s coming together, but being shunned from their families. The first ‘true’ music video could be that from the Beatles, who after making a  feature film, started to create short clips of their music, known as ‘Filmed Inserts’, in order to distribute and to broadcast to other countries.

But possibly the most notable step forward was Music on TV, such as the British Top of The Pops and MTV, where as Top of the Pops was only a small time of airtime on the BBC, MTV was the beginning of a constant 24 hour stream of music, with the first being ‘Video killed the Radio Star’. This was the beginning of many famous TV stations, which would later come out, such as Kerrang! Q! Scuzz and others. But as technology progressed, and the rise of the internet, many bands and singers began to find fortune and popularity on the internet, using social network and large based streaming services such as Myspace, Facebook and Youtube.