Short answers, pulled from the story.
The earliest recognized precursor to a music video dates to 1894, when sheet music publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hired electrician George Thomas to project still images onto a screen alongside live performances of their song 'The Little Lost Child'. The oldest example of a promotional music video with similarities to modern abstract videos is the 1958 Czechoslovak film 'Dáme si do bytu', created and directed by Ladislav Rychman.
MTV launched in 1981 with 'Video Killed the Radio Star' by The Buggles as the first music video aired on the channel.
Michael and Janet Jackson's 'Scream', directed by Mark Romanek in 1995, is the most expensive music video to date, with a reported production cost of $7 million. Madonna's 'Bedtime Story', also directed by Romanek in 1995, cost a reported $5 million.
The Beatles were central to establishing the music video format. From 1965 onward they produced promotional film clips for distribution on Top of the Pops and in the United States, allowing them to promote releases without in-person appearances. Their 1967 colour clips for 'Strawberry Fields Forever' and 'Penny Lane', directed by Peter Goldman, used avant-garde techniques including reversed film, slow motion, dramatic lighting, and colour filtering. The inaugural MTV Video Music Awards in 1984 honoured the Beatles with the Video Vanguard Award.
MTV initially described itself as a rock-music-oriented channel, which it cited as the reason videos by Black artists were rarely aired. Musician Rick James publicly accused the channel of 'blatant racism' in 1983 after it refused to air his video for 'Super Freak'. David Bowie also confronted MTV before 'Thriller' was released, stating he was 'floored' by the channel's neglect of Black artists and pointing out that the few videos by Black artists appeared only between 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m.
The Human League released the first commercial video single in 1983 on both VHS and Betamax formats. It was not a major commercial success because the £10.99 retail price was far higher than the approximately £1.99 cost of a 7-inch vinyl single. 'Justify My Love' by Madonna, released as a video single in 1990 after MTV banned it, remains the best-selling video single of all time.