Music Video History

One of the earliest music videos was St Louis Blues by Bessie Smith:


This was one of the first to feature the singer lip-syncing.

Len Lye, in the 1930s, experimented with kaleidoscopes and in the 1940s, Walt Disney released Fantasia. In the '50s, Walt Disney released an animation that was completely sung.





Scopitone Jukeboxes were introduced the 1960s and they had unofficial, colour music videos.

Also in the '60s, the Beetles released "Hard Day's Night", a film based around an album, and The Monkees had their own TV show.

The Kinks were among the first to make music videos with a linear narrative, in the 1960s.

In 1966, Bob Dylan released Homesick Blues, the music video for which included a man holding up cards with the lyrics written on them.

In the 1970s, Queen released the music video for Bohemian Rhapsody, which was pioneering in terms of special effects used in music videos, as they included many visual effects that had previously not been put to use in music videos.



Top of the Pops, in the 1970s, helped to promote artists, generating more interest around their music videos. If the song did not have a music video, which was quite common at the time, they had a group of dancers who would perform for the audience.

In the 1980s, MTV, a 24-hour TV channel, was launched, which showed music videos constantly. The first music video to be shown on MTV was Video Killed The Radio Star.



Also in the '80s, Michael Jackson used a successful film director, Martin Scorsese, to direct the music video for his song, Bad. Scorsese had previously directed Taxi Driver and was in production on Raging Bull.



In 1985, VH1, a channel that was aimed at an older demographic than MTV, which was largely aimed at teenagers, was launched. In 1986, Channel 4 began to show some chart music videos.

Dire Straits were among the first to use animation in their music video with Money For Nothing.



In 1986, Peter Gabriel released Sledgehammer, which was very popular.



In the '80s, many music videos were banned due to inappropriate content.

From 1994-present, music videos have begun to be made with very large budgets, for example Bad Blood by Taylor Swift.



Scream by Michael Jackson, released in 1995, had the most expensive music video to date, with a budget of $7,000,000, most of which was spent on the low gravity visual effects. This was recently overtaken by Bad Blood with a budget of $9,000,000.