History of Music Videos

The definition of a music video is a 3-4 minute film (usually) combing elements of imagery, video and sound, which are usually relevant to the lyrics or song itself. The idea of a music video is to promote the song itself and business wise produce further sales which people often forget considering being a singer is a job as this is also a form of marketing and advertising combined. Music videos themselves started at the early 1900’s and from the timeline I have created it shows the development and influence of the ages that have created and aspects such as Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ music video has inspired likes like Lady GaGa’s telephone music video by using the technique of telling a story through a video or song. Another aspect that has influenced music videos of this age is MTV. They based their business on music videos and were the start of many too do this and considering music videos have been around for a long time, music videos weren’t at there peak in till the 1980’s when MTV aired certain bands such as “The Buggles”, which could have caused its success. Editing plays a big part in the music video industry, as this is one of many techniques to make them so successful. One example would be the speed of the video, such as fast-forward or slow motion. These two methods have been used mainly a lot in contemporary music videos use a variety of styles of film techniques such as animation, live action filming and performance based approaches like abstract film. Some music videos even take two techniques and blend them, for example, animation and live action blend. Over the years the development of music videos started from the early 1900's, the timeline I have made shows the change and inspiration from artists such as Michael Jackson and Lady GaGa have had on the music industry, as well as technology such as YouTube and iTunes, and the change of fictional videos including irrelevant images to the lyrics as well as matching images to the lyrics.