The history of music video

20s: Start of short films being made to accompany music

One of the earliest surviving music videos on YouTube is a 1929 video for Bessie Smith's  hit 'St. Louis Blues'. Although the music video would be considered very slow paced, simple and cheap compared to the music videos of today, even from such an early music video one can see several conventions still used in promotional videos today. There are elements of a narrative with her appearing drunk and being in a bar. There are also plenty of shots where she is performing, and elements of audience participation.

Bessie Smith - St. Louis Blues

50s-60s

TV was increasingly popular, so it was more important for people to see as well as hear artists. Elvis Presley, The Beatles and Bob Dylan produced short forms for TV.

In 1965 Bob Dylan is credited for releasing the first modern music video: a video for Subterranean Homesick Blues which was used as a segment to the film 'Don't Look Back'. The video is fairly basic, with lyrics written on paper and held up by a boy, but this idea is actually still popular today.

Bob Dylan - Subterranean Homesick Blues

70s

It wasn't until the 1970s that the music industry really started using TV shows to their full potential in terms of promoting music. The short promos produced started to replace live performances of the artist on TV shows, meaning the artist could be promoted in many places at one time. Queen's video for Bohemian Rhapsody is a great example. At the time it was a groundbreaking video which marked the beginning of the modern music video era, with real time and effort being put in to the video.

Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody

80s: the launch of MTV

In 1981 MTV was launched - the first music channel! This changed music PR forever, becoming the artist's largest promotional tool of the decade. Ironically, the first song played on MTV was 'Video Killed the Radio Star' by Buggles, a reference to the importance of artists' looks, not just their talent, since music videos had become a prominent form of promotion. Before this change a look at Top of the Pops would reveal an array of appearances, as it was the music that mattered.

Buggles - Video Killed The Radio Star

Music videos got more time-consuming and expensive as successful artists competed to create the most impressive music videos. In 1983, 'Thriller' by Michael Jackson was the first music video produced with a budget over $1 million. It was also the first feature-length, narrated video.

Michael Jackson - Thriller

To date, the most expensive music video is 'Scream' by Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson, released in 1995. The video cost $7 million to produce, which would be about $10.5 million today. 

Michael Jackson - Scream

MTV and the rising importance of making expensive music videos created problems. The MTV generation did not have access to the internet, so they were only exposed to the most successful artists who could make expensive videos. There was therefore little variety and people only had access to a few genres. So audiences suffered, and so did small artists because they were struggling to be promoted.

2005 - YouTube

The video-sharing site as powerful (if not more) than MTV was launched! It created an opportunity for any artist to promote themselves worldwide. This gave a chance for creative and funny artists who were not yet popular to promote themselves, and this new approach appealed to younger audiences so new artists had a way into the music industry. 

One of our frequent examples on this blog (sorry guys, but it's such a good example) is OK Go's 'Here It Goes Again'. We can see from the video that the filming equipment used is not brilliant quality, and the band is not particularly popular in the mainstream music industry even now. But through YouTube, their creativity and effort could finally pay off! This is a great example of a smaller artist with a low budget gaining popularity through YouTube, where their video would probably never be seen if the only option to promote it was through MTV.

OK Go - Here It Goes Again