History Of Music Videos

1894 - Edward B.Marks and Joe Stern hired George Thomas an Electrition to put together a set of images to artists songs, to help promote them. This became known as the illustrated song.

1926 - The arrival of talkies saw the development of many short musical films. Vitaphone shorts (Warner bros. production) featured many bands, vocalists and dancers. Animation artist Max Fleischer introduced a series of sing-along short cartoons called Screen Songs, which invited audiences to sing along to popular songs by "following the bouncing ball".


Musicals where also contributors to the contemporary music video such as 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes', 'West Side Story' and 'Summer Holiday' as this allowed artists to sell the music and influence the future generation such as West Side Story dance fights do in MJ's 'Thriller' and 'Diamonds Are A Girls Bestfriend' on Madonna's 'Material Girl'. 
The Late 1950's saw the development of the Scopatine. A visual Jukebox in france which allowed French artists to produce short films to be viewed alongside there songs. 

1961 - Canadian show Singalong Jubilee, began pre-recording the music audio, went on-location and taped various visuals with the musicians lip-synching, then edited the audio and video together.




1964 - Beatles 'A Hard Days Night' directed by Richard Lester was seen as a Mock Documentary with videos accompanying hit songs.
                                            

                                         
1965 - The Beatles start making promotional clips for songs as seen in the clip below 

1966 - 1968 Saw The Monkees create a hit US Series following the same modal of performing songs. And Can be seen below the Pilot Episode

1966 - Also saw one of the first Music Videos as we know it by Bob Dylan "Subterranean home sick blues" filmed by D.A. Pennebaker; saw Dylan shuffling cards in a city back alley.

1970's - Top Of The Pop begins 

1972-73 Bowie creates promotional clips for "Jean Genie" and other from "Hunky Dory"

1975 - Queen Creates Bohemian Rhapsody one of the videos to be edited on made on Video Tape 

                                        

1981 - US launched MTV airing "Video Killed The Radio star" 

                                      

1983 - Michael Jackson's 14 minute long "Thriller" was aired on MTV, an iconic moment for African American artist who rarely saw there music played. 

            

1983 Onwards - Music videos have continued to become more and more popular; expanding across TV channels and the internet such as Youtube. 

Music videos (Mainly pop) have gone from the artists performing dance routines and singing,  fully clothed, as seen in Billie Piper's "Because We Want Too" - an example of Sven Carlsson's theory. To females dressed in barely anything which shows example of Laura Mulvey's theory of "The Male Gaze" where females can be viewed as objects as seen in "Pour It Up" - Rihanna.