History of Music Videos

Music History.

In the past music videos were called promotional films, e.g. ‘films of gigs’. However in the 1980’s MTV showed how important music videos were, the first ever music video to be showed on MTV was the Buggles (video killed the radio star). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8r-tXRLazs In the late 1970’s ‘top of the pops’ started playing but had a limitation on how many they could show, in favor of having the band in the studio. However in the 1980’s a number one hit was David Bowie ‘ashes to ashes’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t7dVsBDrJ8&feature=fvst) featuring a Pierrot Clown, also used in the 2008-2010 hybrid Sci Fi/ Police Procedural Crime Drama series of the same name.

Although Michael Jackson took the music videos to a new territory, with a song called ‘thriller’, which a 14 minutes long but costed £500,000, one of the most expensive music videos of all time. However Jackson influenced more black artist to perform and MTV to give those artists more airtime on TV. In 1992 MTV started to list the directors to give music video their own style and recognizable of genre categories.

Convergence (the variety of technology that sells the audience products) is now significant, by the 2000s MTV and many other channels that are similar, started to show chart/pop music in terms of focusing on Genre. There was a major development in the music industry on how music videos are marketed, YouTube was created for the use that music videos can be marketed viral.  In 2010 artists Lady Gaga’s music video ‘bad romance’ became the most publicly viewed video on YouTube that year. Also now apple has evolved, distribution of music is much easier as iTunes was created, for easy accessibility for apple products to access the latest tunes. Music videos are part of an overall marketing strategy but have grown in popularity as a media form and can now be seen as a genre with its own sub-genre

Music videos use a range of film making techniques including animations, live action, documentary style, alternative/non narrative approaches and standard film narrative, often employing a 3 act narrative structure. The words ‘3 minute culture’ have been used to describe the music video and they can be analysed like any moving image media by semiotically deconstructing the technical and symbolic codes revealing narrative codes and structure, genre and sub-genre, hybridity and intertextuality , issues of representation and industry areas of study like convergence synergy and ownership.