History Of Music Video's

History of Music Video’s

Due to the invention of Film and Cinema in the early 1900’s it became more of a possibility to combine moving images and music to try and create the very early stages of a music video. During the 1920’s in America the early stages of music videos were very apparent, ‘jazz’ music was very popular at the time, which influenced artists such as Bessie Smith to make short videos to complement some of her popular songs. This was arguably the first video, which featured actual visuals along with a music soundtrack and was seen as a big thing in America as nobody else had ever done something like this before.

Bessie Smith St Louis Blues - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Who6fTHJ34

As the years went on Technology slowly started to improve which allowed artists to experiment and make more up to-date and modern videos for that era. In 1965 Bob Dylan filmed ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ as a segment for D.A Pennebakers film – Don’t look back – this video has been widely credited as one of the first modern music video’s because it has the unique idea of writing the lyrics to the song on handheld signs so as the lyrics can be read whilst listening to song.

Bob Dylan - Subterranean Homesick Blues - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP4XP8CaX7k

In 1970 the record industry discovered Pop music TV shows which they found was a good opportunity to promote and also discover new kinds of artists. The shows focused on producing short ‘promos’, which promoted the artist and then put their short video on Live TV which replaced the artist performance, which would have been live on stage. The music shows became very popular as fans of the artist now had the chance to see music videos of the artist that they liked.

Five years later in 1975 Bohemian Rhapsody released by Queen became a very iconic video and marked the beginning of the video era. This video was viewed by millions of the public and set the language for the modern music video. The video is considered one of the first that used advanced visual effects. The image of the four band members in the spotlight became a very well recognized image and plays a part in why the video was commercial popular. The idea that they used was very clever as they featured both a live performance and also the visuals effects of Mercury’s face flowing away screen, which was shot by a camera pointing at the monitor giving this effect.

Queen Bohemian Rhapsody -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ9rUzIMcZQ