A music video is a video that integrates a song or an album with imagery that is produced for promotional or musical artistic purposes. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a music marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings. These videos are typically shown on music television and on streaming video sites like YouTube, or more rarely shown theatrically. They can be commercially issued on home video, either as video albums or video singles. The format has been described by various terms including "illustrated song", "filmed insert", "promotional (promo) film", "promotional clip", "promotional video", "song video", "song clip", "film clip", "video clip", or simply "video".
While musical short films were popular as soon as recorded sound was introduced to theatrical film screenings in the 1920s, promotional music videos started becoming popular into the 1960s and the music video rose to prominence in the 1980s when American TV channel MTV based its format around the medium.
Music videos use a wide range of styles and contemporary video-making techniques, including animation, live-action, documentary, and non-narrative approaches such as abstract film. Combining these styles and techniques has become more popular due to the variety for the audience. Many music videos interpret images and scenes from the song's lyrics, while others take a more thematic approach. Other music videos may not have any concept, being only a filmed version of the song's live concert performance.
History and development
In 1894, sheet music publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hired electrician George Thomas and various artists to promote sales of their song "The Little Lost Child". Using a magic lantern, Thomas projected a series of still images on a screen simultaneous to live performances. This would become a popular form of entertainment known as the illustrated song, which can be regarded as a predecessor of the music video.
Talkies, soundies and shorts With the arrival of "talkies" many musical short films were produced. Vitaphone shorts (produced by Warner Bros. Pictures) featured many bands, vocalists, and dancers. Animation artist Max Fleischer introduced a series of sing-along short cartoons called Screen Songs, which invited audiences to sing along to popular songs by "following the bouncing ball", which is similar to a modern karaoke machine. Early cartoons featured popular musicians performing their hit songs on camera in live-action segments during the cartoons. John Logie Baird created Phonovision discs featuring Betty Bolton and other singers from the 1930s. The early animated films by Walt Disney, such as the Silly Symphonies shorts and especially Fantasia, which featured several interpretations of classical pieces, were built around music. The Warner Bros. cartoons, even today billed as Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, were initially fashioned around specific songs from upcoming Warner Bros. musical films. Live-action musical shorts, featuring such popular music artists as Cab Calloway, were also distributed to theaters.
Blues singer Bessie Smith appeared in a two-reel short film called St. Louis Blues (1929) featuring a dramatized performance of the hit song. Numerous other musicians appeared in short musical subjects during this period.
Soundies, produced and released for the Panoram film jukebox between 1939 and 1947, were musical films that often included short dance sequences, similar to later music videos.
Musician Louis Jordan made short films for his songs, some of which were spliced together into a feature film, Look-Out Sister (1948). These films were, according to music historian Donald Clarke, the "ancestors" of music video.Clarke, pg. 39
Musical films were another important precursor to a music video, and several well-known music videos have imitated the style of classic Hollywood musicals from the 1930s–50s. One of the best-known examples is Madonna's 1985 video for "Material Girl" (directed by Mary Lambert) which was closely modelled on Jack Cole's staging of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" from the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Several of Michael Jackson's videos show the unmistakable influence of the dance sequences in classic Hollywood musicals, including the landmark "Thriller" (1983), and the Martin Scorsese–directed "Bad" (1987), which was influenced by the stylized dance "fights" in the film version of West Side Story (1961). According to the Internet Accuracy Project, DJ/singer J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson was the first to coin the phrase "music video", in 1959.
In his autobiography, Tony Bennett claims to have created "...the first music video" when he was filmed walking along the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London, with the resulting clip being set to his 1953 recording of the song "Stranger in Paradise". The clip was sent to UK and US television stations and aired on shows including Dick Clark's American Bandstand. The oldest example of a promotional music video with similarities to more abstract, modern videos seems to be the Czechoslovak "Dáme si do bytu" ("We´ll put in the apartment") created and directed by Ladislav Rychman in 1958.
Beginnings of popular music television and promotional clips: late 1950s–1973 In the late 1950s the Scopitone, a visual jukebox, was introduced in France and short films were produced by many French artists, such as Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy, Jacques Dutronc, and the Belgian Jacques Brel to accompany their songs. Its use spread to other countries, and similar machines such as the Cinebox in Italy and Color-sonic in the U.S. were patented. In 1961, for the Canadian-produced show Singalong Jubilee, Manny Pittson began pre-recording the music audio, went on-location and taped various visuals with the musicians lip-synching, then edited the audio and video together. Most music numbers were taped in-studio on stage, and the location shoot "videos" were to add variety. In 1964, Kenneth Anger's experimental short film, Scorpio Rising used popular songs instead of dialogue.
On 1 January 1964, Johnnie Stewart and Stanley Dorfman created the British chart music television series Top of the Pops, which they produced in tandem and directed in weekly rotation until the 1970s. The show's format created a demand for frequent studio appearances by renowned British and US artists at short notice, as the charts came out on Tuesday mornings and the show was taped live on Thursdays. Coupled with the artists busy touring schedules and subsequent requests from broadcasters in Europe and America to showcase popular British acts, ultimately prompted the production of pre-recorded or filmed inserts referred to as "promotional videos." These videos served as substitutes for live performances by the artists and played a pivotal role in the development of the music video genre. During the early stages of the show's introduction in 1964, when alternative footage was unavailable, Dorfman and Stewart resorted to capturing footage of the enthusiastic audience dancing. However, a significant change took place in October 1964 when a decision was made to occasionally introduce a dance troupe with choreographed routines for specific tracks. This addition brought a new dynamic to the show, enhancing its visual appeal and diversifying the entertainment value for viewers. One notable example was the video for Roy Orbison's song 'Oh Pretty Woman', which Dorfman filmed and directed in the rooftop garden of London's Kensington-based Derry and Toms department store on 19 October 1964 as a visual accompaniment to the song. It subsequently aired on Top of the Pops on 22 October, 29, as well as 12 November and 19." By the 1970s, Top of the Pops had an average weekly viewership of 12,500,000 people, had solidified its status as the premier international platform for artists launching new records at the time, had firmly established the significance of promotional film clips as a crucial tool for promoting the careers of emerging artists and generating buzz for new releases by established acts, and was significant in developing and popularizing what would later become the music video genre across the globe.
In 1964, The Moody Blues producer Alex Murray wanted to promote his version of "Go Now". The short film clip he produced and directed to promote the single has a striking visual style that predates Queen's similar "Bohemian Rhapsody" video by a full decade. It also predates what the Beatles did with promotional films of their single "Paperback Writer" and B-Side "Rain", both released in 1966.
Also in 1964, the Beatles starred in their first feature film, A Hard Day's Night, directed by US filmmaker Richard Lester. Shot in black-and-white and presented as a mock documentary, it interspersed comedic and dialogue sequences with musical tones. The musical sequences furnished basic templates on which numerous subsequent music videos were modeled. It was the direct model for the successful American TV series The Monkees (1966–1968), which was similarly composed of film segments that were created to accompany various Monkees songs. The Beatles' second feature, Help! (1965), was a much more lavish affair, filmed in color in London and on international locations. The title track sequence, filmed in black-and-white, is arguably one of the prime archetypes of the modern performance-style music video, employing rhythmic cross-cutting, contrasting long shots and close-ups, and infrequent shots and camera angles, such as the shot 50 seconds into the song, in which George Harrison's left hand and the neck of his guitar are seen in sharp focus in the foreground while the completely out-of-focus figure of John Lennon sings in the background.
In 1965, the Beatles started making promotional clips (then known as "filmed inserts") for distribution and broadcast on Top of the Pops and in different countries—primarily the U.S.—so they could promote their record releases without having to make in-person appearances. Their first batch of promo films shot in late 1965 (including their then-current single, "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out"), were fairly straightforward mimed-in-studio performance pieces (albeit sometimes in silly sets) and meant to blend in fairly seamlessly with television shows like Top of the Pops and Hullabaloo. By the time the Beatles stopped touring in late 1966, their promotional films, like their recordings, had become highly sophisticated. In May 1966, they filmed two sets of colour promotional clips for their current single "Rain"/"Paperback Writer" all directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who went on to direct The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus and the Beatles' final film, Let It Be. It aired on Top of the Pops on 2 June. The colour promotional clips for "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", made in early 1967 and directed by Peter Goldman, took the promotional film format to a new level. They used techniques borrowed from underground and avant-garde film, including reversed film and slow motion, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles, and colour filtering added in post-production. At the end of 1967 the group released their third film, the one hour, made-for-television project Magical Mystery Tour; it was written and directed by the group and first broadcast on the BBC on Boxing Day 1967. Although poorly received at the time for lacking a narrative structure, it showed the group to be adventurous music filmmakers in their own right.
Concert films were being released in the mid-1960s, at least as early as 1964, with the T.A.M.I. Show.