The History of Music Videos

One of the first noted relationship between music tracks and visual material can be traced back to Oscar Fischinger in Germany in the 1920’s and the in the 1930’s with his abstract, visual interpretations such as Komposition in Blau (1935) and his later work on the Disney film Fantasia (1939)

After this, short films were made to showcase an artist in the early days of sound filmmaking, films upto eight minutes long in duration were used to display the talents of artists from Billie Holiday to Bing Crosby. These short films played in cinema screenings but were mainly as reels on the forerunner of the video jukebox the panarom.

The panarom was used in juke joints and bars in its heyday from 1939-46 but died out quickly after the war, it contained a 20inch screen with back projection and contained a reel of eight shorts with played in a sequence and thousands of these 16mm films know as “soundies” were produced. In these days the shorts were more sexually and even politically explicit than the music videos of today are as they were less likely to be censored.

The idea of the panarom was resurrected in France with the birth of the Scopitone, the machine provided films in colour and indvidual selection, play and rewind 36 short films, giving consumer choice.

Within time television coverage of pop music attempted to capture the new teenage audience from American Bandstand in the USA in the 1950’s through to Top of the Pops in the mis-1960’s in the UK and the need to have musical act on TV led to the creation of short promo films often used in place of studio appearance. The Beatles made films for Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever.

MTV was launched in 1981 airing “Video Killed the Radio Star” and beginning 24-hour-a-day music television and by the mid-1980’s MTV was taken over by Viacom, MTV also played a central role in popular music production and the music business, also having it’s own version of the Oscars, The Video Music Awards. VH1 was established as an album orientated channel aimed at an older audience. Then the launch of the European version of MTV in 1987 led to a swift uptake of subscribers.

Viacom was responsible for music moving away from the narrow rock video market to a wider range of music genre giving MTV a more conventional schedule.

At the start of MTV it was very white music orientated with not much music of black origin until Hype Williams who lead the way for music of black origins in the 1990's.