Music video history

1890's-First image made added to music.
1894 saught the first image based video, sheet music publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hired electrician George Thomas and various performers to promote sales of their song "The Little Lost Child". Using a magic lantern, Thomas projected a series of still images which became a popular form of entertainment and took the steps towadrs the form of a music video.


1926–1959: Talkies, soundies, and shorts
In 1926, with the arrival of talkies, many musical short films were produced. Vitaphone shorts produced by Warner Bros. featured many bands, vocalists and dancers. Blues singer Bessie Smith appeared in a two-reel short film called St. Louis Blues (1929) featuring a dramatized performance of the hit song. Numerous other musicians appeared in short musical subjects during this period.


During the 1940's short music videos really became popular which often showed short sequences of dance clips, this then became a basis for which many music video's got their inspiration from.Musical films were another important precursor to music video, and several well-known music videos have imitated the style of classic Hollywood musicals from the 1930s to the 1950s.

1960–1973: Promotional clips and others
The late 50's started to see a increased usage for promotional clips, the Scopitone, a visual jukebox, was invented in France and short films were produced by many French artists, such as Serge Gainsbourg and  Françoise Hardy, to fit in with their songs. It soon spread to other countries and similar machines such as the Cinebox in Italy and Color-Sonic in the USA were patented.

1964 saw the involvement of The Beatles as they starred in their first feature film A Hard Day's Night, Shot in black-and-white and presented as a mock documentary, it interspersed comedic and dialogue sequences with musical tones. The musical sequences furnished basic templates on which countless subsequent music videos were modeled.



The extensive range of musical types and styles in the contemporary scene presumes a sophisticated and experienced audience that is readily able to identify and analyse music. The fusion of image and sound in a video adds a further layer of complexity and creativity to a bands output.Videos eventually started to add a narrative sequence as the performance, usually with relation to the lyrics, from this complex narratives were developed and abstract interpretations that defined music video's as a genre, this led to a multi-layered representation that comprise contemporary music videos. The forms and conventions of moving image text are challenged and manipulated endlessly in music video and has transmogrified into a unique form. Music videos operate as fantasies constructed around the music embodied within the text and limitations for the music presented.
The visual construct both extends and defines the reception of the musical track that is presented as spectacle in this way. Video style in today's generation and advancement tends to be related to the genre of music embodied in the video, the conventions of a rock video will be completely different to the conventions in a r'n'b video, we now identify different visual codes with different music genres. Music video's now use alot more money than they ever have, usually they tend to have a lot going on visually so the audience has to grasp the narrative of the video.