The History of Music Videos

The History Of Music Videos
Music videos came into their own around about the 1980’s, when MTV based their format around the medium, and later with the launch of VH1.

The first music video was said to be in 1984 when sheet music publishers still ran the music business. 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 a screen simultaneously with live performances, in what became a popular form of entertainment known as the illustrated song, this thereon has been coined the first music video.

In the late 1950’s the Scoptione, a visual jukebox was invented in France and short films were produced by many French artists such as Francoise Hardy to accompany their songs. It’s use spread to other countries and similar machines such as the Cinebox in Italy and Color-Sonic in the USA were made.

In the UK long running TV show ‘Top Of The Pops’ began playing music videos in the late 1970’s although the BBC placed strict limits on the number of ‘outsourced’ videos TOTP could use.

In 1981 the US channel MTV launched, airing ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ and began running 24 hour a day music on television. With this new outlet for material the music video would gradually become an essential role in music marketing.

The use of the internet and music videos, the earliest purveyors of music videos on the internet were IRC based groups who recorded them as the appeared on television, then digitalised them exchanging the mpg files via IRC channels. The website IFilm which hosted short videos, including music videos launched in 1997. by the mid 2000’s MTV and many of it’s sister channels had largely abandoned showing music videos as they found reality television shows more popular with viewers. In which MTV helped pioneer the show ‘The Real World’ which premiered in 1992.

Low fi internet music clips, following the shift toward internet broadcasting and the rising popularity of video sites such as YouTube around 2006 some independent filmmakers began recording live sessions to present on the internet. It began as the only method for little-known indie music artists to present their work.

Censorship in music videos, a music video is a form of artistic expression, artists are only on occasions censored if their content is deemed offensive. What may be considered offensive differs in various countries, due to censorship laws, local customs and ethics. The first music video banned by MTV was Queen’s 1982 video for ‘Body Language’ for homoerotic undertones, etc. Michael Jackson’s music video for ‘They don’t care about us’ was banned from MTV, VH1 and BBC because of the alleged ‘Anti-Semitic’ message in the song and the visuals in the background of the ‘Prison Version’ of the video.

In 2010 Lady Gaga’s video for ‘Telephone’ was banned by MTV, claiming the content should not be shown within their programming but soon began showing the video frequently on European MTV programming.
Unofficial fan made music videos (Bootleg tapes) are typically made by synchronizing existing footage from other sources, such as television shows or films with the song. The first known fan video was created by Kandy Fong in 1975 using still images from Star Trek loaded into a side carousel and played in conjunction with a song. Fan videos made with videocassette recorders soon followed. Such videos are sometimes known as OPV’s ( Original Promotional Videos, or Other People’s Videos) In the case of Japanese anime videos the source material is drawn from anime or from American animation series’. As neither the song or visuals is typically licensed distribution of the two is technically copyright infringement on both counts. An example of a unofficial video was that of Danger Mouses illegal mash up of the ‘Encore’ song with music sampled from the Beatles’ White Album in which concert footage of the Beatles is remixed with footage of Jay Z and rap dancers.