History of the music video

History of the music video:

• A music video is a short film or video that accompanies a complete piece  of music, most commonly a song .

• Modern music videos were primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings.
• Music videos are often called promotion videos or simply promos , due to the fact that they are usually promotional devices. Sometimes, music videos are termed short-form music videos to distinguish them from full length movies pertaining to music. In the 1980s, the term "rock video" was often used to describe this form of entertainment, although the term has fallen into disuse.
• The earliest music videos or music promos were filmed in the mid 1950’s, however, before then, as early as the 1920’s, films by animators such as Oskar Fischinger were accompanied by musical scores labeld ‘visual music’.
• The defining work in the development of the modern music video was The Beatles ' first major motion picture, A Hard Day's Night in 1964 , directed by Richard Lester . The musical segments in this film arguably set out the basic visual vocabulary of today's music videos, influencing a vast number of contemporary musicians, and countless subsequent pop and rock group music videos.
• The key innovation in the development of the modern music video was, of course, video recording and editing processes, along with the development of a number of related effects such as chroma-key . The advent of high-quality colour videotape recorders and portable video cameras coincided with the DIY ethos of the New Wave era and this enabled many pop acts to produce promotional videos quickly and cheaply, in comparison to the relatively high costs of using film. However, as the genre developed music video directors increasingly turned to 35mm film as the preferred medium, while others mixed film and video. By the mid-1980s releasing a music video to accompany a new single had become standard, and acts like The Jackson's sought to gain a commercial edge by creating lavish music videos with million dollar budgets.
• In the information technology era, music videos now approach the popularity of the songs themselves. Enthusiasts of music videos sometimes watch them muted purely for their aesthetic value. Instead of watching the video for the music, (the basis for the artform), the videos are appreciated for their visual qualities, while viewers remain uninterested in the audio portion of the performance. This is a normal sociological reaction, some say, to the increasing trend in the music business to focus on visual appeal of artists, rather than the quality of the music. Critics say that the corporate music managers, over the course of logical and calculated business decisions, have sought to capitalize on the sex appeal of females in music videos rather than in choosing less profitable musicianship-based music.

Here are some outstanding examples:

By Luke Clarke