Music Videos

A music video is a short film or video that accompanies a piece of music

• Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings.
• Music videos came into prominence in the 1980's

• Music videos use a wide range of styles of film making techniques, including animation, live action filming, documentaries, and non-narrative approaches such as abstract film.
• Some music videos blend different styles, such as animation and live action.
• Many music videos do not interpret images from the song's lyrics, making it less literal than expected.

IMPORTANT DATES:

1894: George Thomas projected a series of still images on a screen simultaneous to live performances. This would become a popular form of entertainment known as the illustrated song, the first step toward music video.

1926: Wth the arrival of "talkies" many musical short films were produced.

Early 1930s:Cartoons featured popular musicians performing their hit songs on-camera in live-action segments during the cartoons.

1940's: one-song films - "promotional clips".

Late 1950's:The Scopitone, a visual jukebox, was invented in France and short films were produced by many French artists.

1961:For Canadian show Singalong Jubilee, Manny Pittson began pre-recording the music audio, went on-location and taped various visuals with the musicians lip-syncing, then edited the audio and video together.

1970's: The long-running British TV show Top of the Pops began playing music videos, although the BBC placed strict limits on the number of 'outsourced' videos TOTP could use. Therefore a good video would increase a song's sales as viewers hoped to see it again the following week.

1981-1991: the U.S. video channel MTV launched, airing "Video Killed the Radio Star" and beginning an era of 24-hour-a-day music on television. With this new outlet for material, the music video would, by the mid-1980s, grow to play a central role in popular music marketing. Many important acts of this period, most notably Adam and the Ants, Duran Duran and Madonna, owed a great deal of their success to the skillful construction and seductive appeal of their videos.

• The most successful and influential music video of all time was released — the nearly 14-minute-long video for Michael Jackson's song "Thriller". The video set new standards for production, having cost US$500,000 to film.
•  MTV launched the channel VH1
• MTV Europe was launched in 1987

Two key innovations in the development of the modern music video were:

• the development of relatively inexpensive and easy-to-use video recording and editing equipment
• the development of visual effects created with techniques such as image compositing

 2005-Present: The earliest purveyors of music videos on the internet were members of IRC-based groups,who recorded them as they appeared on television, then digitised them, exchanging the .mpg files via IRC channels.

• 2005- LAUNCH OF YOUTUBE
• 2007 -LAUNCH OF MYSPACE'S Video functionality.
• Such websites had a profound effect on the viewing of music videos; some artists began to see success as a result of videos seen mostly or entirely online.
• the RIAA issued cease-and-desist letters to YouTube users to prevent single users from sharing videos, which are the property of the music labels.
• MTV itself now provides streams of artists' music videos, while AOL's recently launched AOL Music features a vast collection of advertising supported streaming videos.
• At its launch, Apple's iTunes Store provided a section of free music videos in high quality compression to be watched via the iTunes application. More recently the iTunes Store has begun selling music videos for use on Apple's iPod with video playback capability.

 The Internet has become the primary growth income market for record company-produced music videos!

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