History of music videos...

In lesson today, we started looking at the history of music videos. The definition of a music video is a short film integrating a song and imagery and is produced for promotional and/or artistic purposes. I feel by looking at the history of the music video I can find out what to include in the genre that I have chosen. While looking at and researching into music videos I will be able to take ideas and knowledge from them as a whole as through history they have help shape and change the music industry. Modern music videos are normally made for marketing purposes, and to promote the actual sale of the song, however music videos have featured throughout history for many different reasons such as just purely entertainment purposes.

Music videos first started to be made around about the 1920's but these music videos were very simple and basic because of the use of technology was far from advanced. They normally would just show a live or band performance of the song however they started to incorporate talkies and music videos by putting music videos in the short films, an example of this would be  Bessie Smith's song St. Louis Blues which features in a short film showing in this clip 6 minutes 58 seconds in. This was a good way of promoting a song as at this time lots of people were going to the cinemas to watch these styles of film.

This music video was from the 1960's, Bob Dylan's song Subterranean Homesick Blues this was something different in terms of music videos and maybe revolutionised them as a whole as it was one of the first music videos to do something different as a style of music video. The video it self was cards with the lyrics on and the cards would change along with song so that the lyrics on the cards would match the song being played, this was one of the first videos to include text within the song which was also why it was very different. This also followed Goodwin's theory about the relationship between the lyrics and the visuals of a music video.


It then wasn't until the mid 1970's that it started to change again like for example Queens, Bohemian Rhapsody also changed the face of music videos as it was one of the first music videos to contain any visual effects which was amazing for anyone watching it at this time it also changed the way people started to watch music videos because before everyone watched music videos in the cinema then after this video was released the industry thought of the idea to bring out TV channels just for music videos to be watched on.       


Music videos only got bigger as time progressed but this was down to lots of different factors but one major one is the start of the TV channel MTV which started in the 1980's and basically showed music videos all the time. This TV channel is still massive today and shows all the modern music as well as classics of all different genres.