Music Video timeline

Bessie Smith - St. Louis Blues (1929) was considered to be the first music video. As you can see the pace of the shots are extremely slow and there are little variations in the type of shots. For example the most common shot is a mid shot of the women singing and a long shot of the room she is in. There are no effects that link each shot together either. They were also no prerecording of the song so the song was sung properly whilst it was being filmed.




Music Videos became more and more popular by the 1960's. Elvis Presley did a music video for 'Return the sender' in 1962. However the videos tended to be a recreation of him singing live to an audience. The shots still tended to be limited in terms of how many there were and the variety of shots, however the songs were prerecorded.



In the 1970's Abba was around and released 'Take A Chance On Me' in 1977. The main thing that stands out in the 70's music videos was the amount of editing used due to the change in the variety of shots. Music videos tended to start to have more of a story to them whilst the amount of shots used to make a video now started to increase as well.




In the 1980's MTV US first started airing. One of the groundbreaking video was 'Sledgehammer' by Peter Gabriel. The main thing I noticed about 1980's music videos is that they started to have a narrative to them, linking the words sung to the images shown.




A big music video in the 1990's was by Cascada 'Every-time we touch'. The main thing that I noticed about the 1990's music videos was the pace of the shots matching the pace of the lyrics. The shots started to speed up if the music was upbeat and slowed down if it was a sad, depressing song. The cameras also improved in the 90's allowing for a crisper picture whilst the artists tended to wear brighter, bolder clothes, meaning they could stand out from the crowd.

How important is music videos today?

I don't feel music videos are as important today as how important they were 20/30 years ago. I think this due to the fact that our generation has been brought up with music videos so are used to them whereas they were seen as a must have in previous years as the generation before us weren't used to music videos with narratives. Also with technology allowing people to listen to music on the go by the use of  Ipods etc people don't want to be walking around holding their gadget watching a video as the music is more important to them. Also with age limits on music videos now it makes it restricts certain people from viewing the video, so will not be as interested in them.