Brief history/timeline of music videos
1894 - The first step towards the creation of music videos
Sheet music publishers Edward B. Marks 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 on a screen simultaneous to live performances. This would become a popular form of entertainment known as the illustrated song, the first step toward music video.
1920's - With the arrival of "talkies" many musical short films were produced. Vitaphone shorts (produced by Warner Bros.) 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
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.
1940's - Soundies, produced and released from 1940 to 1947, were musical films that often included short dance sequences, similar to later music videos.
1950's - In his autobiography, Tony Bennett claims to have created "...the first music video" when he was filmed walking along the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London in 1956, with the resulting clip being set to his recording of the song "Stranger in Paradise". The clip was sent to UK and US television stations and aired on shows including Dick Clark's American Bandstand.
The oldest example of a promotional music video with similarities to more abstract, modern videos seems to be the Czech "Dáme si do bytu" ("Let's get to the apartment") created in 1958 and directed by Ladislav Rychman.
In the late 1950s, the Scopitone, a visual jukebox, was invented in France and short films were produced by many French artists. Its use spread to other countries, and similar machines such as the Cinebox in Italy and Color-Sonic in the USA were patented.
1960's - Artists 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. Most music numbers were taped in-studio on stage, and the location shoot "videos" were to add variety.
In 1964, Kenneth Anger's experimental short film, Scorpio Rising used popular songs instead of dialog.
Following this, lots of artists started to create visual videos to go with their songs including the beatles, david bowie and bob Dylan
The introduction of Music Television (MTV)
First hit the screens on the 1st of August 1981 and its first music video was 'Video killed the radio star'
Followed by 'you better run'
Originally for artists to gain more popularities, has helped audiences connect with music on a new level. It focused on rock acts for a long period time leaving many black artists out regular rotation. This was broken in 1983 when MJ's 'Billie Jean' was played. This paved the way for more black artists to be shown.
They introduced their own MTV music awards in 1984 and then 8 years later they introduced the MTV movie awards. As MTV's popularity grew they created music video related shows.
They began to broadcast live coverage of music concerts including Live Aid
Then by the mid 2000's MTV started to show more reality shows meaning their music related content was decreasing.
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