History of music videos

History of music videos

A music video is usually a short 3-4 minute long video clip that accompanies a song. There are many benefits to having a music video such as the fact that it provides a visual representation of the artist and helps raise the publicity of the song.

 It is important to understand the history of music videos as one can see how they developed and how there purpose has changed. Music videos can be traced back as far as the 1920s. Blues singer had short film of video of her singing it was shown in movie theatres until 1932. Therefore it was shown as a hit. It wasn't intended as a music video as we would know today but a dramatized performance for her hit song. In the 1950s and 1960s music videos purpose where for promotion usually for films. They weren't known as music videos but "promo videos". The music video for the single promotion of a song and one that can be recognized today is the Beatles "its been a hard days night". During the onset of the 1980s it became cheaper to make music videos and "the Jacksons" brought inn the idea of multimillion budgeted music videos which helped the sale of there music. In 1981 MTV was launched which helped increase the following to music videos. Music videos also boosted sales of they're respected artist as they usually had to be banned or edited which meant controversy therefore an increase in sales. Music videos today are even more important in catching viewers attention thus improving the artists reputation and reception.

Figure 1: Illustrating the history of MTV

Figure 2: showing the top ten critically acclaimed music videos of all time acceding to watchmojo.com giving us a scope of what was successful. At what time and if it followed the codes and conventions of they're genre.