History Of The 'Music Video'

A music video is a short film or video that accompanies a complete piece of music/song. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings. Although the origins of music videos go back much further, they came into their own in the 1980s, when MTV based their format around the medium, and later with the launch of VH1. The term "music video" first came into popular usage in the early 1980s. Prior to that time, these works were described by various terms including "filmed insert", "promotional (promo) film", "promotional (promo) clip" or "film clip".

In 1894 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 on a screen simultaneously with live performances in what became a popular form of entertainment known as the illustrated song. This has been termed the first music video. Even today, many music videos and much contemporary television still use series of still images accompanied by song.

One of the earliest performance clips in 1960s pop was the promo film made by The Animals for their breakthrough 1964 hit "House Of The Rising Sun". This high-quality colour clip was filmed in a studio on a specially-built set; it features the group in a lip-synched performance, depicted through an edited sequence of tracking shots, close ups and long shots, as singer Eric Burdon, guitarist Hilton Valentine and bassist Chas Chandler walked around the set in a series of choreographed moves.

In 1964, The Beatles cemented their newfound international fame by starring in their first feature film A Hard Day's Night, directed by Richard Lester. Shot in black and white and presented as a mock documentary, it was a loosely structured musical fantasia interspersing comedic and dialogue sequences with exciting and innovative musical sequences. The musical sequences furnished the basic templates on which countless subsequent promo clips and music videos were modelled and it has exerted a huge influence on the style and visual vocabulary of the genre. It was the direct model for the successful US TV series The Monkees (1966–1968) which similarly consisted of film segments that were created to accompany various Monkees songs.

The monochrome 1966 clip for Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" filmed by D. A. Pennebaker was featured in Pennebaker's Dylan film documentary Don't Look Back. Eschewing any attempt to simulate performance or present a narrative, the clip shows Dylan standing in a city back alley, silently shuffling a series of large cue cards (bearing key words from the song's lyrics).

The Who featured in several promotional clips in this period, beginning with their 1965 clip for I Can't Explain. Their plot clip for Happy Jack (1966) shows the band acting like a gang of thieves. The promo film to Call Me Lightning (1968) tells a story of how drummer Keith Moon came to join the group: One fine day, the other three band members are having tea inside what looks like an abandoned hangar when suddenly a "bleeding box" arrives, out of which jumps a fast-running, timelapse, utterly out-of-control Moon that Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, and John Entwistle subsequently try to get a hold of in a sped-up slapstick chasing sequence to wind him down.

The Rolling Stones appeared in many promotional clips for their songs in the 1960s. One of the earliest, dating from 1964, showed the band on a beach, miming to their single "Not Fade Away", but this has apparently since been lost. In 1966, Peter Whitehead directed two promo clips for their single "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow?”

The long-running British TV show Top of the Pops began playing music videos in the late 1970s, although the BBC placed strict limits on the number of 'outsourced' videos TOTP could use. Therefore a good video would increase a song's sales as viewers hoped to see it again the following week. In 1980, David Bowie scored his first UK number one in nearly a decade thanks to director David Mallet's eye catching promo for "Ashes to Ashes". Another act to succeed with this tactic was Madness, who shot on 16 mm and 35 mm, constructing their clips as "micro-comedic" short films.

(All information was found on Wikipedia's Music Video page)