The history of music videos

In the 1950’s, televisions were becoming more and more popular due to them being able to be rented and the amount of channels increasing. By 1963, a lot of homes had a television and this is the year that The Beatles had their first live TV performance. This performance was on the Ed Sullivan show in America and almost 85 million people watched the show. It is reported that at the time of the show there was no reported crime in New York and after they had 10 of their songs in the top 20. This shows that TV had a massive impact on The Beatles and on the music video industry because it showed how much people cared about seeing their favourite bands. This was the first real music promo video and it was the breakthrough in America for The Beatles.

 

 

 In 1965, Bob Dylan released the first real music video, with Subterranean Homesick blues. This video features bob Dylan in an alley way with cards with the lyrics of the song on and he is changing the cards when the lyrics change in the song. The song and video is very anti-establishment, because it is speaking about drugs and is taking a dig at the government. It is also shot in black and white and has poor mise en scene and is only one shot, this shows that there was not much money put in to the video because it was sensitive topics. Later that year, The Beatles released a music video for paperback writer, which was in colour, had multiple shots and featured lip syncing and had mise-en-scene relating to instruments. This shows that there was a lot more money put in to this song because the Beatles were very popular and the song was less about the government and was about an author instead. This means more people would listen to it and it would be less controversial.

 A few years later, in 1967, Love is all you need by the Beatles was written and performed live on the first global television link. This performance was watched by 400 million people in 25 different countries. On Boxing Day, The film ‘Magical mystery tour was featured. The film was made with lots of trippy effects and colours but due to it being aired in black and white these didn’t work and it was considered boring. This era was a very strict era and it was later banned because in the film it uses the word ‘knickers’ but no one realised that at the end of one of the songs, there is a chant that says ‘oompa loompa stick it up your jumper’ and then changes to everyone smoke pot’. This is anti-establishment because it is telling people to do things that the government didn’t want people to do.

In 1975, Queen recorded a video for the song ‘Bohemian Rhapsody”. This video was a big step in the recording of music videos as it was the first video to ever be recorded on to tape, which was also a very expensive method of recording. This video included lots of editing and it also had an effect where it looked like their heads where cascading away, which was done by pointing the camera at the monitor and using visual feedback. Queen also used a variety of fades and other editing techniques.

In the 1980’s, MTV was created. This was the first channel on TV that was purely dedicated to music videos. Most artists that featured on MTV were ones that were very popular and had money to produce a video. The first ever video featured on MTV was The buggles’ ‘Video killed the radio star’. In its early days, between music videos the screen would go black while someone inserted the next VHS. One of the main problems with MTV at this time is that not many bands/artists could submit music videos so it had to repeat the same ones which made them somewhat boring after a while, but as they became more popular, so did MTV.

As music videos were becoming more popular, artists were making much more elaborate music videos and even some short films, such as Thriller by Michael Jackson. The video for this song was 13 minutes long and it had $500,000 spent on its production. It featured hundreds of actors and used the best prosthetics, make up and costumes and eventually sold 9 million copies.

With technology also advancing along with the popularity of music videos, much more complex videos can be made, such as the writings on the wall by OKGo. This video is all filmed in just one shot using one camera on a special device called a Fig rig which is a camera stabilization device that let the director get all the shots and different movement in the video.