Music Video History

Music Video History - By Pete Fraser (2004) 

- The initial music videos, right back in the 1920's and 1930's were just videos that would suggest to the viewer to go to the local record store and buy the record, so strictly promotion for the sales of the record with not much more meaning. For example Fischinger Films were made on a contract with Electola Disks for advertisement purposes.

- In 'short films' showed in the 1930's and 40's there was a common trend of showing women in a sexual nature. In this day and time this was highly frowned upon in modern society, but in music videos overt sexuality in music videos was highly common and accepted in music videos, and this theme has continued throughout modern music videos.

- In the late 1950'5 and early 1960's many directors were influenced by music videos such as 'Elvis Presley - Jailhouse Rock' and British star 'Cliff Richard - Summer Holiday'. This was due to their new method of placing the star in a variety of fictional contexts, and started to develop a theme and a story to the visuals. Also documentary styled music videos became popular in the visualisation of popular music in the 60's. Ideas started to develop, which really turned heads in the 60's for the audience to be much more aware of the visuals.  

- In the USA, 'The Monkees' were created in response to the UK's band 'The Beatles'. The 4 band members were carefully selected for how they would look on TV, concentrating on the image and the portrayal of them to the audience for artist recognition. They were individual due to the wacky comedy they used, surrealism, and the wacky musical performance. This was evident they were concentrating on image, and influenced many artists and bands to use image to sell, such as the rising popstars and boy bands in the 90's. 

- This rising popularity of making artists into 'mega stars' through visuals such as Madonna, influenced record sales through music videos.

- Budgets of music video's was raised from just a few thousand in the 1960's to almost millions in the late 1990's, as record sales shot through the roof once a music video was released. Competition between artists was created and music videos were prominent in the sales of an artist.