History of music videos

The audience can use a range of different methods to watch music videos that have been made for specific songs by certain artists, sometimes these videos are the reason why people know of a specific band or artist. The ways the audience can watch these videos include going onto youtube to find videos performed by a band or going on the TV and looking for a music channel that also shows a wide range of music videos owned by different artists.

The first music channel that was ever created was called "MTV" which was created 1981 on the 1st August, this enabled people to watch their favourite bands or artists perform their new songs that was soon to be released for them all, it was a way of creating hype and buzz for the audience as they really want to get this song so they can play it themselves. The first official music video to be shown on MTV was "video killed the radio star", the video had an underlying meaning that television and the advancements of technology were rendering the radio obsolete, the song was extremely successful due to this video hitting the mainstream and being played everywhere, this video can be argued to have started the music video into what it is today due to the huge amount of success the song had, so this song was popular in 1979 in England an unknown in America, MTV changed this massively when the music video first aired and the song gained a huge support in America. Many people noticed this trend and so the music video as we know it today was born and MTV had become so popular, by 2015, MTV had their channel in 93,240,000 american households which just shows how far music videos have come. There have now been countless other programmes trying to implement what MTV had done but they still remain one of the most dominant ones on this genre of television. However music videos changed and some seemed to create controversy to gain their popularity and pushed the boundaries of what was allowed in music videos, a band called Duran Duran made a music video for a song called "girls on film" that featured a lot of women that were extremely revealing throughout the video, to the point that it may be considered pornographic by some viewers, this is where they had to introduce some form of censorship to stop videos like these getting to the public that could be offended by the videos content. Nowadays, songs on mtv can be shown only after watershed (9:00PM) that are deemed offensive or adult in a certain way, some words are even muted just so that kids don't learn how to curse from their idols.


Youtube was a form of social media that allowed users or audiences to search for any video that they could think of that existed and had been uploaded. Youtube changed the music industry forever, youtube allowed users or audiences to look for their favourite singers online and watch some of their artists songs just because they are good fans, the benefit of doing this over watching the tv for it was that they could choose what to listen to. The most popular videos on YouTube are songs with music videos, this shows that music videos can gather a great amount of support and become very successful over songs without official music videos, to summarize, songs that have music videos are much more popular. A song that pretty much proves this little theory is a song that is known around the world but without a music video is psy's gangnam style which received over a staggering 2 billion views and counting to this day. It had all the tropes that make a song so successful, including a dance trend that was easy to do, catchy beat and was just funny to some people. After its release it was parodied by thousands but they were not successful as the original song was a parody of itself, you can't parody a parody and that's why the music video stood out far above the other music videos on youtube. However this shaped many other successful videos in the sense that it would use several different locations that vary in different ways, it also made it necessary to create a dance trend as seen in this video and finally it also created a sort of trend that it would show how perfect ones life is as the audience see in the video that he has lots of girls with him, this allows men to be influenced by the video as well as being able to relate to it.



















As music videos began to evolve and become increasingly more popular, they would make more money, if a video looks amazing and you, the audience are able to relate to it, those artists responsible for the creation of the video make more money off of the video. To show the ways in which that music videos have changed with their budgets increasing lets use the first music video shown on MTV which is 'video killed the radio star' to one of the most expensive music videos ever made which is Michael Jackson's 'scream' which is a music video about the future and space time travel, it is a very strange video so it is mostly up to the audiences interpretation of what it is about. 'video killed the radio star' (VKTRS) had a budget of £60,000 which really isn't much compared to 'scream' which had a staggering budget of $7,000,000, this is evident in the special effects of both videos, for today's standards VKTRS looks quite primitive in its effects but as a first, it was good for its time, it just didn't age well for the most part, however, scream is impressive for its visuals being quite abstract, also there are even parts where they are almost walking on walls that were made with movable sets to give the illusion that they are actually walking on the walls, this increase in budget could be to make a video that the audience would remember and due to how abstract scream is, a lot of people will remember its rather strange visuals. The technology and special effects for VKTRS at the time were groundbreaking in terms of music videos and really upped the boundaries of what artists were allowed to do with their videos, also for this video, lots of technology was created for the purpose of getting the songs message across like the tv's scattered throughout the video. Scream on the other hand is a clear demonstration of how special effects and technology had gotten better over the years as said earlier the fact that they had moving sets to make it look as if they were on walls walking around it also had stylistic camera shots as well as other edits on the big tv screens, both music videos try and portray the future in a sense and both had pushed the boundaries set previously, like the music videos becoming so enormously popular or becoming extremely expensive. Viewings of these music videos have increased as time went on for youtube as VKTRS has nearly 9,000,000 views which is impressive as it is quite old and less know today, but compared to screams 42,000,000, it's easy to see why there have been dramatic changes in the music video genre in terms of views on youtube, this could be partly to the artists' reputation as the boggles aren't well known today, but Michael Jackson is still as popular as he was a few years back and was regarded the king of pop for a while as he had some massive hits in his time.

In conclusion, this research has enabled me to understand the first stepping stones of the music video and how some managed to set the bar for others who tried to do the same and emulate a particular style as their own, this research has also given me an insight as to what can make a music video even more popular and how it can start trending among audiences. I have also been able to see how music videos have changed and why they've changed. This research will help me when making my own video as it has given me knowledge on how to make a music video and what is needed for a music video to be successful.