"A music video or song video is a short film integrating a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes." -Wikipedia
But what does that mean to us when we will be producing our own? To me, a music video is a way of visually reprecenting a song, capturing it's meaning, essence or narrative in a creative way. It's how we as an audience get an insight into the artists personality and their kind of music and is often one of the main pormotional devices for a record company. So keeping the definition of what a music video should be, and more crucially, has been before, fresh in our minds as we go into this process.
Music videos are often entirely dependent upon an awareness of genre, whether you are going to fit to the conventions of the genre or not. The main genres are thus:
Pop and Chart music
Rock
Indie
R'n'B
Soul
R'n'B and Hip Hop
Jazz and Blues
Dance Electronic
Country
How Music Video Began
Talkies and Soundies
With the arrival of talkies in 1926 (films with synchronised sound), many more musical short films. Early cartoons are an example of this, such as Loony Tunes. Live action musical shorts, featuring such popular performers as Cab Calloway, were also distributed to theaters. Soundies were invented around the 1940's and were another early form of music video. Soundies were one-song films made for the Panoram visual jukebox. People would be able to watch the sequence created for the song that was chosen in black and white, usually in diners or bars. These were short films of musical selections, usually just a band on a movie-set bandstand, showing that it had been staged for a viewing purpose.
Bessie Smith - St. Louis Blues (1929)
As a dramatised version of the hit song 'St Louis Blues' in 1929 by the blues artist Bessie Smith, this is classed as the first ever music video ever made. The 'film' was two reels short and featured a dramatised performance. It was shown in theatres in America until 1932.
In 1940, Walt Disney released Fantasia, an animated film based around famous pieces of classical music. The Sorcerers Apprentice is probably one of the most well known from the film and could be classified as a music video for the classical pieces used, as the film sets the moving image to previously produced music.
Musical films were also an important influence on what we now know as music video. Old Hollywood musical numbers from the 1930's and 50's heavily influenced later music videos, an example of which is Madonna's Material Girl.
In the 1950's, music films became popular, featuring performance clips of the artist. Elvis Pressely's Rock Around the Clock is a notable example of these types of films.
Music videos as we know them today began to be produced for music programmes such as Top of The Pops in Britain and Hullabaloo in the USA. These were used as promotional clips for groups, in particular for The Beatles in the 1960's with their song Yellow Submarine. It was after this that other acts began to follow their example, and music video promotional clips were soon produced for others.
The Start of Music Video Television
In 1981, the US music channel MTV was launched - ready for an era of 24-hour-a-day music viewing.
The first music video to be featured on the channel was The Buggle's 'Video Killed The Radio Star', which really provides a strange sense of irony and perhaps now truth.
Surprisingly, many of the first music videos came from Great Britain. Music videos by Duran Duran (who ended up creating very visually interesting videos for the time), were made because their songs had not been aired on the radio and the band wanted publicity. They recieved popularity after their music videos were aired on the new music channels.
Many artists besides Duran Duran, such as Madonna, Michael Jackson and U2 recieved promotion and created their career after their videos were featured on MTV.
Now, with the popularity of music video, MTV has many varying channels that are solely for separate genres. These include Classic, Base, Rocks, Dance and Live variations of the channel, whilst the original MTV shows mainly current chart music.
Music Video in the Online Age
Downloading of videos off the internet is now common and this is seen as a threat to the dominance of MTV, because more people are watching music videos on YouTube and converting these to an MP4 format that they can view on their Ipods or tablets. This can result in the artist not getting the right amount of money for their troubles and are losing out on their income, because their jobs rely on people paying to view and listen to the music/videos.
Despite this, in my view and I think many others, YouTube has meant that people now have greater access to a large range of music videos that they have never previously heard. This means that artists are reaching a far wider audience and are gaining more potential fans through the websites suggested videos format. It also generates a whole new source of revenue for acts through YouTube's advertising models and allows the bands and solo acts alike to reach out to their fanbase in an interactive and almost personal way.
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