History.
A music video is defined as 'a short film intergrating music imagery for promotional or artistic purposes'. Nowadays most mainstream, successful artists will normally produce a music video for their most popular songs or to promote an album, by releasing a music video for a song featuring in an upcoming album. Due to the increasing popularity of video-sharing sites, such as YouTube and Vimeo, music videos have become more and more common.
What we know as 'music videos' started as promotional clips for songs, to market artist's music without them having to make in-person appearances to grow their fan base.
Music videos went mainstream in 1981 when MTV started airing videos twenty-four hours a day. Two key innovations leading to the development of modern videos are because of easy-to-use and fairly low cost video and editing equipment, making videos easy to produce. As well as this the development of visual effects made the music videos stound out from the crowd.
As video-sharing sites emerged in the 2000s music videos became dramatically popular as users of the sites could choose the videos they wanted to watch. YouTube today has a huge collection of music videos, which are highly popular, in fact some of their most viewed videos are in fact music videos.
Since the 1930s simple music promos and clips have turned into high-budget pieces because of their increased ease of access, thanks to television and the emergance of video-sharing sites. They can now be produced for a low cost so most artists with even a small-medium fanbase are able to produce music videos to accompany their songs.
In England, with the release of their new record Day Tripper/We can work it out in 1965, The Beatles started releasing promotional clips for their songs. They produced films, lasting up to an hour, whcih led to concert films being released in the mid-1960s. After this point, artists that were wealthy enough and had a large enough audience to produce, distribute and exhibit music videos did so for their most popular or latest songs, to gain larger audiences. As music videos became increasingly popular, directors were hired, specifically for the purpose of creating videos.
Post 1974, music videos started to appear on television, initially appearing on Australian TV channels, Countdown and Sounds. This led to new channels, featuring music videos more often, such as on Top of the Pops.
David Bowie created the first music video to cost over $500,000 in 1980, for his song 'Ashes to Ashes', with a production cost equalling $1,671,487 nowadays. (left)
