History of The Music Video

In 1927 Al Jolson was the first person to bring sound and visuals together to create the first feature length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences, which followed him to star in more quite successful musical films throughout the 1930’s. This lead to an era of musicals throughout the 1930’s also with the introduction of the panarom which was a very early style video duke box.

Also through the 1920s-30s Oskar Fischinger was the first person to use visual products to promote a song, by using animation to help try and sell a song, this was shown in cinemas in first his home country of Germany then after moving to America he used his concept in cinemas there.

The 1940’s then followed on to the Golden age of Hollywood musicals following through to live TV performances being launched in the 60s. These TV performance shows included the well known Top of the Pops and also The Monkees. These both were the first shows of their kind that played live music on the television with Top of The Pops first show attracting huge interest due to a star studded first show featuring the like of the Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Where as the Monkees was almost a promotional series that showed a young and upcoming band in a sit-com situation, this followed on to bring them success and fame through a musical career.

However on the scale of music video history most famously Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody was the first proper promo video to be released in 1975 solely to accompany the release of a band single. Prior to this promo-videos had been tried and in general had never taken of, but despite this after Bohemian Rhapsody the whole music video culture was started, and in this sense the videos we see today where started by this video. Due to the obvious public interest towards this video it prompted companies such as MTV to spring into action, while artists across the globe started to make music videos.

In 1981 MTV begins to broadcast followed shortly by the massive release of the music video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which was made on a five million dollar budget. This was the first music video in history that really used a large budget and is what set off many other producers and directors to use much more money to produce a music video. As well as this music box begins in Europe, followed by the MTV music video awards starting. Shortly after this in 1985 VH1 begins and MTV is quickly taken over by Viacom, promoting MTV Europe in 1987.