History Of Music Videos

First ever musical

Sep 12, 1866

The Black Crook is considered to be the oldest example of a musical or conforming to the concepts of one. It was based on the book by Charles M. Barras and was distributed over 474 performances in New York. These types of theatrical performances are early forms of music videos as they use songs to tell the audience about pieces of the narrative and keep it flowing.

First Music Video

Dec 24, 1929

Bessie Smith was an extremely popular blues singer in the 1920s and 1930s. Her song, which features in the 1929 film St Louis Blues, is the earliest example of an accessible music video. The video is in black and white and features her singing at a bar, not too dissimilar to current videos in terms of concepts.

Jailhouse Rock - Elvis Presley

Sep 24, 1957

Elvis's performance of the song in the film, choreographed as a dance routine involving himself and a large group of male prisoners, was featured among other classic MGM musical numbers in the 1994 documentary That's Entertainment! III. The film version differs from the single version of the song, featuring backing instrumentation and vocals not heard on the record. This changed the way music videos were consequently made as nowadays songs are altered to suit the action on screen.

Love Me Do - The Beatles

Oct 5, 1962

This was The Beatles's first song and music video of their amazing career and although early jazz artists created short music-film performances of their songs, and Elvis filmed unique settings of his songs that were parts of movies, the Beatles were the pioneers of marrying the two ideas into the concept of a music video. The idea came to them as a way to ease their ridiculously tight schedule by avoiding lots of public appearances on TV shows as they were able to send off footage instead.

Subterranean Homesick Blues - Bob Dylan

Jan 1, 1965

The song was used in one of the first "modern" promotional film clips, the forerunner of what was later known as the music video. Promotional films were the next generation of the developing music video, as Bob Dylan used cue cards with phrases and words from the lyrics, holding them up when the word was played. The video arguably acted as one of the first lyric videos and received multiple awards.

MTV

Aug 1, 1981

This was the first ever 24 hour video music channel to appear on TV and was established with the song 'Video killed the radio star' kicking off their coverage.

Michael Jackson - Thriller

Nov 30, 1982

This music video is extremely well known and iconic due to the dance moves and the narrative of the video. Rather than the song being played over the video, the song is interrupted at certain points as we are drawn into the narrative. Additionally the zombie dance that features in the video are still being replicated to this date with the songs popularity ever increasing reaching 415 million views on YouTube.

Sledgehammer - Peter Gabriel

Apr 25, 1986

This music video was the first one to feature animation and was extremely popular with many MTV awards and Grammy nominations. During this time, animation would have just been established so this videos use of the new technology encouraged other artists to use animation in their videos. Consequently, the most interesting ones include animation.

IFILM

Oct 24, 1997

The website iFilm, which hosted short videos, including music videos, launched its service in 1997. Napster, a peer-to-peer file sharing service which ran from 1999 to 2001, enabled users to share video files, including those for music videos.

Baby one more time - Britney Spears

Oct 23, 1998

This music video was successful and popular because of the clear narrative throughout the video. It is set in a school and is relevant because Britney Spears was only a teenager when this song was produced and most of her fans were of her age. Therefore her audience was attracted directly because of the engaging narrative.

YouTube

Feb 14, 2005

This media platform changed the way audiences watched videos. It allows you to watch anything possibly imagined and is a great place for music videos which for many people, is their main website to watch them. Music videos distributed on YouTube receive millions of views and is a great way to make the song more popular.

Spotify

Apr 23, 2006

With new technologies allowing us to stream music, Spotify has become the most popular application to listen to music. Songs appear on Spotify as soon as they are released which means that there will be a higher demand for the music video, meaning potentially more views as the music videos will be highly anticipated.

Gangnam Style - PSY

Jul 15, 2012

This music video was extremely popular almost reaching 3 billion views on YouTube and being the most watched music video on the site mainly because of the artists unusual dance moves. The comedic element of this video made it easy to watch and also entertaining, two key things for a successful music video.