Music video

• 1. Introduction

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  The music video is one of those art forms so embedded in modern life that its origins feel almost invisible. Yet the story of how moving images came to accompany recorded song runs from a magic lantern in 1894 all the way to a teenager watching a vertical clip on a smartphone in the 2020s. What started as a sheet-music promotional trick has grown into an entire industrial ecosystem that defines how artists rise, fall, and make their mark.

  In 1894, sheet music publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hired an electrician named George Thomas to project still images on a screen while their song 'The Little Lost Child' was performed live. That simple act of pairing image with sound planted a seed that would take decades to fully flower. The questions that follow are not just about when MTV launched or which video cost the most to produce. They are about why images became so inseparable from music, who shaped that bond, and what happens when the gatekeepers lose their grip.

• 2. Early Ancestors

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  Max Fleischer's Screen Songs cartoons invited theater audiences to follow a bouncing ball and sing along to popular songs, mimicking what we would now call karaoke. That was just one of several early forms that foreshadowed the music video without quite being one. Vitaphone shorts from Warner Bros. put bands, vocalists, and dancers on screen alongside their recordings. Early Walt Disney animated films, including the Silly Symphonies shorts and especially Fantasia, were built entirely around music.

  Blues singer Bessie Smith appeared in a two-reel short called St. Louis Blues in 1929, in a dramatized performance of her hit song. A decade later, Soundies were produced for the Panoram film jukebox between 1939 and 1947, short musical films that often included dance sequences strikingly similar to later music videos. Musician Louis Jordan went further still, making short films for individual songs, some of which were later spliced together into the 1948 feature Look-Out Sister. Music historian Donald Clarke called these films the 'ancestors' of music video.

  The influence of classic Hollywood musicals also proved lasting. Madonna's 1985 video for 'Material Girl', directed by Mary Lambert, was closely modelled on Jack Cole's staging of 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend' from the 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' (1983) and the Martin Scorsese-directed 'Bad' (1987) both drew on the stylized dance sequences of Hollywood musicals, with 'Bad' influenced specifically by the film version of West Side Story from 1961.

• 3. Television Creates the Demand

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  On the 1st of January 1964, Johnnie Stewart and Stanley Dorfman launched Top of the Pops, a British chart music television series they produced in tandem and directed in weekly rotation. The structure of the show created a very specific problem: the charts came out on Tuesday mornings, the show was taped live on Thursdays, and Britain's most popular acts were often on tour or inaccessible. The solution became the genre.

  When artists could not appear in person, pre-recorded film inserts began to stand in for them. One notable early example was the video for Roy Orbison's 'Oh Pretty Woman', which Dorfman filmed on the rooftop garden of London's Kensington-based Derry and Toms department store on the 19th of October 1964. It aired on Top of the Pops just three days later, on the 22nd of October. By the 1970s, Top of the Pops had an average weekly viewership of 12,500,000 people.

  The Beatles accelerated everything. Their 1964 film A Hard Day's Night, directed by Richard Lester, intercut comedy with musical sequences that became basic templates for countless videos that followed. By 1965 the band was producing promotional clips specifically for broadcast on Top of the Pops and in the United States, so they could promote releases without making in-person appearances. The colour promotional clips for 'Strawberry Fields Forever' and 'Penny Lane', made in early 1967 and directed by Peter Goldman, used techniques borrowed from underground and avant-garde film including reversed footage, slow motion, dramatic lighting, and colour filtering added in post-production. Their made-for-television project Magical Mystery Tour, first broadcast on the BBC on Boxing Day 1967, was poorly received at the time but showed the group working as adventurous music filmmakers in their own right.

• 4. The MTV Era

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  On a day in 1981, the American cable channel MTV launched by airing 'Video Killed the Radio Star' by The Buggles, a track that had itself been the first music video played on the channel. That ironic choice announced the start of a period in which the music video shifted from promotional accessory to central pillar of the recording industry.

  Michael Jackson's nearly 14-minute video for 'Thriller', directed by John Landis and released in 1983, cost US$800,000 to film and set new standards for production. Before 'Thriller', 'Billie Jean', and 'Beat It' reached MTV, videos by African-American artists were rarely played on the channel. Musician Rick James said publicly in 1983 that MTV's refusal to air his video for 'Super Freak' and clips by other Black performers was 'blatant racism'. David Bowie had also confronted MTV directly in an interview before 'Thriller' was released, saying he was 'floored' by how much MTV neglected Black artists and noting that the 'few black artists that one does see' only appeared between 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m.

  In 1984, MTV launched the MTV Video Music Awards, and the inaugural event rewarded both the Beatles and David Bowie with the Video Vanguard Award for their pioneering work. That same year MuchMusic launched in Canada. MTV Europe followed in 1987, and MTV Asia in 1991. The 1986 Dire Straits video for 'Money for Nothing' made pioneering use of computer animation, and Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' from the same year, which used techniques developed by British studio Aardman Animations, went on to win nine MTV Video Music Awards.

• 5. Censorship and Controversy

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  Queen's 1982 hit 'Body Language' holds the distinction of being the first video banned by MTV. The channel had nevertheless aired Olivia Newton-John's 1981 video for 'Physical', which featured male models in string bikinis pairing off toward the men's locker rooms, though some airings cut the overt ending.

  Madonna became the artist most associated with music video censorship over this period. Her 1990 video for 'Justify My Love' was banned by MTV for its depictions of sadomasochism, homosexuality, cross-dressing, and group sex. In Canada, that ban by MuchMusic led directly to the launch in 1991 of Too Much 4 Much, a late-night series in which officially banned videos were broadcast alongside panel discussions about why they were removed. 'Justify My Love' remains the best-selling video single of all time.

  In 1983, the Kinks made what became one of the earliest plot-driven clips, for their single 'Dead End Street'. The BBC reportedly refused to air it for being in 'poor taste'. The Rolling Stones' 1967 clip for 'We Love You', directed by Peter Whitehead, intercut studio footage with a mock trial that clearly referenced the drug prosecutions of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards underway at that time. Jagger's girlfriend Marianne Faithfull appeared in the trial scenes presenting the 'judge' - played by Richards - with what may have been the fur rug from press reports of the drug bust at Richards' house earlier that year.

  Lil Nas X's 2021 video for 'Montero (Call Me By Your Name)' drew heavy criticism from conservative and religious groups for a scene in which he gives a lap dance to Satan. He responded by promoting merchandise including 'Satan Shoes' made in collaboration with a company called MSCHF, which featured a bronze pentagram, an inverted cross, and a drop of real human blood. The controversy contributed to the song debuting at number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

• 6. The Internet Dispersal

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  YouTube launched in 2005 and changed the economics of music video distribution more decisively than any single artist or label decision had before it. For the first time, viewers did not need a cable subscription or a record label's promotional push to watch a video. Some artists found success through videos seen almost entirely online.

  The band OK Go capitalized on the growing trend through the videos for 'A Million Ways' in 2005 and 'Here It Goes Again' in 2006, both of which built their audience primarily online before crossing into wider attention. Weezer's 2008 video for 'Pork and Beans' included at least 20 YouTube celebrities of the time, and the single became the most successful of the band's career in chart performance.

  In 2007, the RIAA issued cease-and-desist letters to YouTube users to prevent them from sharing videos that belonged to music labels. After Google acquired YouTube, the platform assured the RIAA it would find a way to pay royalties through a bulk agreement with major record labels. Labels remained divided on the question of whether music videos were advertising for music or products in their own right. MTV officially dropped the 'Music Television' tagline on the 8th of February 2010 from its logo, formally acknowledging that reality programming had replaced music video as its core offering. Vevo, a music video service launched by several major music publishers, debuted in December 2009 with its videos syndicated to YouTube and advertising revenue shared between Google and Vevo.

• 7. Commercial Formats

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  One of the early video albums was Eat to the Beat by Blondie in 1979, a videocassette containing music videos of all tracks from their fourth studio album of the same name, directed by David Mallet. The market for video albums was always considerably smaller than for audio albums: the RIAA requires labels to ship 50,000 units to retailers for a video album to qualify for gold certification, compared to 500,000 units for an audio album or audio single.

  Billboard introduced a weekly best-selling music video sales ranking in the United States, the Top Music Videocassette chart, on the 30th of March 1985. Its first chart-topper was Private Dancer, a 1984 videocassette by Tina Turner containing four music videos. The Official Charts Company began a similar chart in the United Kingdom on the 30th of January 1994, with Bryan Adams's So Far So Good reaching number one.

  In 1983, the British synth-pop band the Human League released the first commercial video single on both VHS and Betamax. It was not a major commercial success, partly because the retail price of £10.99 far exceeded the roughly £1.99 cost of a 7-inch vinyl single. The video single format gained wider traction when Madonna released 'Justify My Love' on VHS in 1990 after MTV blacklisted it. Japanese singer Ayumi Hamasaki has been credited as the creator of the CD+DVD single format, with her 2005 single 'Fairyland' cited as one example of the format she helped establish.