Music videos sold songs long before MTV owned the night
A music video pairs a track with images, mostly to sell recordings. Musical shorts arrived with sound film in the 1920s and promotional clips spread in the 1960s, but the form only took centre stage in the 1980s, when MTV built an entire channel around it.
The lineage starts in 1894, when sheet-music publishers Edward Marks and Joe Stern hired electrician George Thomas to throw magic-lantern slides on a screen during live performances of The Little Lost Child. These illustrated songs became a popular entertainment. Once films could talk, Warner Bros. Vitaphone shorts showcased bands, singers and dancers, and Max Fleischer's Screen Songs cartoons had audiences follow a bouncing ball, much like karaoke. Bessie Smith dramatised St. Louis Blues in a 1929 two-reeler.
Between 1939 and 1947, Soundies were shot for the Panoram film jukebox, often with short dance routines. Louis Jordan filmed clips for his songs, which historian Donald Clarke calls ancestors of the music video. The Big Bopper reportedly coined the phrase music video in 1959, and Tony Bennett claimed his 1953 Stranger in Paradise clip, filmed strolling beside the Serpentine in Hyde Park, was the first. A 1958 Czechoslovak clip by Ladislav Rychman looks surprisingly like modern abstract videos.
France introduced the Scopitone visual jukebox in the late 1950s, prompting films from Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy and Jacques Brel, with rival machines in Italy and the United States. Britain's Top of the Pops, launched on 1 January 1964, taped on Thursdays after Tuesday chart releases, so busy touring acts sent pre-filmed promotional inserts instead of appearing, a key step for the genre.
Hollywood musicals remained a template. Madonna's 1985 Material Girl copied the staging of Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Michael Jackson's Bad, directed by Martin Scorsese, borrowed the stylised dance fights of West Side Story. Today's videos mix animation, live action, documentary and abstract film, and are mostly watched on streaming sites such as YouTube.
Source: Music video
