History of the Music Video

It all started when ‘Top of the Pops’ was created in 1964. When bands couldn’t show up they used to send a tape of them playing to make people believe they were.  This was the first start of the music video.

'Top Of The Pops' Classic Logo

‘Queen’ was allegedly the first people to create a music video/promo. They spent loads of money on it as they wanted people to know they did it first. They also want a lot of publicity, which they got. And it became legendary.

Allegedly The First Music Video

‘The Beatles’ were one of the first bands to do this, yet they didn’t think it was to important, therefore didn’t spend lots of money on it as it wasn’t the most popular thing to do.

‘The Monkees’ saw what The Beatles were doing and how massive they were and these were classed as the Americas Answer to The Beatles. They created a fake band, that didn’t write there own music and preformed on a TV show to make money. There series included lots of narrative, which hadn’t been done over music before.

'The American Version Of The Beatles'

Mike Nesmith, the drummer from The Monkees, thought of a great idea. This idea was called ‘MTV’. This idea made millions and still around today. MTV kicked off in 1981. The artist began to realize how good it was, and interest in the program grew rapidly. MTV was aimed at males, and the program was all rock.



MTV's Original Logo



Bands started really splashing out on there music videos. ‘Duran Duran’ spent over 10000 on there music video. They started using narrative, and from here, narratives got more popular.

‘Thriller’ by ‘Michael Jackson’, was a 10 minuet video that included lots of narrative. Because it was created and directed by a film maker, the video was outstanding for its time. And it cost Michael a lot of money.

A Screen Shot From 'Thriller'

Also ‘Sledge Hammer’ was the first music video ever to have included animation. This was done by ‘Ardman Animation’, the same people who created ‘Wallace and Gromit’. This is done by many photos, and start and stop animations meaning this video wasn’t done by a video camera, and the artist was incredible to be able to lip sink to the track photo by photo.

Because MTV focused on rock, white people, and mainly males, all ‘Black Rap’ was ignored from the program. This was until ‘Aerosmith’ and ‘Run DMC’ got together, and I did a remix of ‘Walk This Way’, and then did a video together. Together they broke the mould, and Rap was more accepted.

Music videos then became the best way to promote your music. And still today is one of the best ways to promote it. Apart from today, there’s more channels for different genres of music (everything’s accepted), and different devices you can watch music videos on.