​A2 Media Studies

A music video is a short piece of footage which combines an artist, a song and imagery; it’s produced for promotional purposes and enhancing the artists career. Modern music videos have a prime focus on being used as a marketing mechanism in order to boost the sales of an album or single of an artist.

 

There’s various styles regarding music videos and the technique used to film the footage; this may include live action filming, documentaries, animation and non-narrative approaches such as abstract films.

The music video originally started years ago in 1894 in which sheet music publishers Edward Marks and Joe Stern hired an electrician called George Thomas and various other performers to promote the sales of their illustrated song ‘The Little Lost Child’. His ‘illustrated song’ – a series of still images printed onto glass slides, coloured in by hand and projected onto a screen alongside a live musical performance – made song-book publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern’s number, The Little Lost Child, a massive hit back in the music halls of 1894.Using a lantern, Thomas was able to project a series of still images on a screen simultaneously to live performances. This song and performance went on to become an extremely popular form of entertainment and was the first step towards the modern day music video we see today.

 

After this further development of the music video emerged; blues singer Bessie Smith appeared in a two-reel short film ‘St. Louis Blues’ in 1929 which featured a dramatized performance of the hit song.

In the 1930’s (1930-1931) Warner Brothers produced ‘Spooney Melodies’ which was a series of five musical shorts; it mixed art-deco animation and live action footage in order to showcase the popular tunes of the day. However, the only one known to have survived which is nearly double the current typical length of a music video at 6 minutes is ‘Crying For The Carolines’.

 

Later, in the 1940’s musician Louis Jordan shot films for his songs some of which were sliced together in to a feature film called ‘Lookout Sister’. Also within the 1940’s were one song films called ‘promotional clips’ for the Panorama Visual Jukebox; these were short films of musical selections and were usually just a band on a movie set which was made for the playing of music. According to music historian Donald Clarke, these films were the ‘ancestors’ of the music video and had a major influence of the development of the music video and making them in to what we see today.

In the late 1950’s a company in France called Cameca in Courbevoie devised a jukebox called the Scopitone which included a 16mm film component. Once this was released, the Italians released a jukebox called the Cinebox which immigrated to the USA with the Scopitone later in the 1960’s. When both the jukeboxes were in the US the Cinebox became the Cinejukebox and Francis Ford Coppolla invested in the Scopitone jukebox. The craze for video jukeboxes declined by 1967 but by this time the enthusiasm for music videos was extremely high.

 

In 1961, for Canadian show ‘Singalong Jubilee’, Manny Pittson began pre-recording  the music audio and then went on location and taped various visuals with the musicians lip-synching to their track before editing the audio and video together in to a music video.

 

TV was an important aspect toward the success of music videos. In the mid-1970s, alongside the UK’s famous Top of the Pops, other TV programmes such as Australian show Countdown and Sounds were also busy promoting and popularising the genre. Sounds presenter and DJ Graham Webb hired new director Russell Mulcahy to shoot videos for songs he wanted to feature on his show but that didn’t already have their own promo clips. Mulchay went on create the video for The Buggles’ ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’. In 1981, there was further development of the music video due to the well-known US video channel- MTV launching; they aired ‘Video killed the radio star’ which to this day is an iconic track and began an era of 24 hour a day music on TV. Because there was a net outlet for material to be produced, the music video was predicted to play a central role in popular music marketing by the mid 1980’s. The most well-known artists within this era that owe a great deal of their success to the skilful construction and seductive appeal of their music video which lead to a lot of money and sales being made are Madonna and Duran Duran.

 

However, the year which marks one of the most significant points of the music video is in 1983 where the most successful, influential and iconic music video of all time was released- Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. The video was almost 14 minutes long and raised the bar for music video production by costing $500,000 to film.

A further vital part within the development of the music video was the launch of ‘The Chart Show; on the Channel 4 in 1986; this was a program which consisted entirely of music videos which were linked by the state of the art computer graphics.

 

In 2005, the web launched one of the most renowned websites of the music industry- Youtube; Youtube makes the viewing of online video’s much quicker and easier; other websites that use a similar interface include Google Videos, Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace. All of these music websites have a massive effect on the viewing of music videos and an artist’s success rate.

 

Music videos are becoming even more important as a way to promote an artist but arguably are also becoming a lot more controversial regarding the openness of sex, drugs, drinking and partying. However, music videos are central to the marketing of an artist and MTV continues to be one of the most forceful channels of televisions. The development of technology in the current era also means that music videos can be watched anywhere with the use of tablets, mobiles etc and the easy accessibility of sites such as Youtube. Youtube is seen as the most modern music video marketing system today as it allows anyone to post their own videos and post it on Youtube to gain themselves views which can occasionally leas to a record label contract. Downloading has a negative impact upon the music industry as it’s being used a lot more often and is a threat to music video channels like MTV as a lot of audiences won’t want to tune in to a channel when they can browse and download any music video they want online.