The History Of Music Video

After Edison had invented the gramophone in the 1900's, the ability to record audio meant that developments within the music industry began to happen. Experiments with the ability to synchronise sound with vision led to the first sound film 'The Jazz Singer' in 1927. This was a massive milestone as it meant that  artists could create video's to go with their music in order to promote themselves. TV shows such as 'Ready Steady Go' gave artists the platform to showcase there latest tracks which gave them the opportunity to target their music at wider audiences as well as entertaining them.

In 1964 BBC introduced 'Top Of The Pops' which is significant as it was the first time that music was listed in terms of charts. Artists would fight to be at the no.1 spot and especially the coveted Christmas no.1. It showed the competition within the industry as bands/artists all wanted to be the best and sell the most records.

Queen are arguably one of the biggest bands there has ever been, and when 'Bohemian Rhapsody' first came out in 1975, it changed everybody's attitude to the music video. It was the first time that we had seen special effects which came as part of a technological development. I think that the significance of this video was that it was a performance from beginning to end and was used to entertain audiences. The star theory is also relevant here as they were made too look/act in a certain way in order to sell records. The music video is over 6 minutes long which is a massive contrast to the average pop song today of 3 minutes. However it could be argued that this is due to music video's in recent years were relatively new and seen as more of a form of entertainment. Differently, today we have access to a wider variety of music video's through sites such as Youtube therefore they are taken for granted.

1981 saw the introduction of the first music channel 'MTV'. This is significant as the availability of cabel/satellite television enabled nice broadcasting. Now MTV have specific channels for different genre's of music such as; 'MTV Dance' 'MTV Rocks' and 'MTV HITS'. This makes it easier for audiences to narrow down the genre's of music video that they are interested in watching/listening too.

After this development artists began to make big budget music video's which have now become iconic. Michael Jacksons 'Thriller' reportedly cost around £500,000 to make and lasts around 14 minutes. It combined narrative, performance and special effects all in one and it arguably one of the most famous music video's in history.