Music videos are a modern idea that we have brought about to music and they are commonly know as 'Promotional videos' because they are said to boost an artists record sales for either that particular song or album that they have produced.
Music videos where first brought about in the early 19 hundreds when people would use them to accompany music that they had produced however as stated before in the modern society they are more often seen as a marketing tool for record companies and bands alike.
1920's - in 1929 blue's singer Bessie Smith appeared in a two reel short film called 'Saint Louis Blue's featuring the hit song, that appeared in theatres until 1932.
1940's - Walt Disney released the film 'Fantasia' based on his hit character Mickey Mouse, the film was musical based and with it being a film the characters where shown to be singing the classical music throughout the story and this proved really affective as it was one of the first colour animations to be released with music, many early based videos where animation videaos and only recently have we developed coloured music videos.
1950's - in this period the very first music promotional videos where being produced for artists and up until this time people had never set out to create videos for this purpose, and in 1956 Tony Bennett was filmed walking through Hyde Park, as a music video for his hit 'Stranger In Paradise' which was distributed throughout the United Kingdom and The United States where it was played on radios nationwide, later on he claimed that he had created the very first music video.
1960's - the visual dukebox was created in France and french artists decided that they would make music videos to accompany their songs which proved very affective for the audience because this was the first time they could see music videos out of a cinema.
as well as this in 1964 The Beatles released their first ever motion picture 'A Hard days night' which saw the band in numerous different locations singing hit songs off their album which was a massive hit becuase people got an in-sight of what it was like to be in the beatles or to even go to one of their performances without having to leave the comfert of thier own home.1970's - into the modern era - Top Of The Pops was established giving artists a chance to perform on T.V where an audience of millions would be watching, this was hoped to promote certain songs and albums written by artists and whoever had the biggest increase in sales the week later, would be re-shown again and so on.
Queens 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was also a key turning point and established that artists where now using the common music video as a marketing device.
1980's - this is when artists started to establish story/narrative plots to thier videos and this drew viewers in to the artists because some could relate to them and in ways artists where now seen as inspirations, as well as this Michael Jackson created the 'short film music video' where a story would be told and part way through the music would start to play whist a narrative was still going on in the back ground.
1990's until modern day - music videos are now conventionally different depending on the genre, as well as this there are now three styles of video, narrative - where a story is told, live performance - where an artist is seen to be playing live and finally an abstract video - where art or pictures are used in a montage edit to create meaning or reason behind the concept of the song being played.
