Music videos have been around for many years, they first came about in France during the late 1950s with the invention of the Scopitone which was a visual juke box. Although invented in France and at first predominantly used by French artists the Scopitone’s use quickly spread to other countries.
The Scopitone paved the way for other countries such as Italy who created the Cinebox and the USA who created the Color-Sonic.
In the 1960s one of the first pop performance clips was made by the animals for their song ‘house of the rising sun’ the lip-synced performance was filmed in high quality colour on a specially built set in a studio the video was choreographed.
Between the late 1960s and the early 1970s promotional clips grew in importance, ‘song films’ or ‘filmed inserts’ as they were known at the time were usually used by artists to show if they could not perform a live show or meet and greet with their fans.
Pink floyd were among the first to start making promotional films for their songs, because of this they were pioneers in the music industry.
In 1974 two programmes premiered called ‘countdown’ and ‘sounds’, both of which were very important in developing and the music video format as a way of promotion in Australia and several other countries.
In the 1970’s top of the pops started showing music videos but were restricted to the number of videos they were allowed to show, this made more bands make music videos as a good music video would increase sales as the audience would want to see the video the following week.
In 1981 the channel MTV launched with a very fitting song for the even 'video killed the radio star' by The Buggles. This launch dramatically increased the use of the music video format and by the mid 1980s it was a central part of popular music marketing.
The developement of easy to use cheap recording equipment has made music videos more easy to make. This enabled pop acts to make promotional music videos easily and inexpensive.
MTV later launched another music video channel which was aimed at an older audience than MTV, this music channel was called VH1.
In 1992 MTV began listing Directors of the music videos.
later in the 1990s they launched channels in various other countries such as MTV India and MTV mandarin and also they launched MTV2 which was to show more alternative and older music.
in 1997 music videos appeared on the Internet where people had recorded them as they were shown on television and digitised them, exchanging them on peer to peer file sharing sites such as napster.
In 2005 the website 'youtube' launched, this made viewing music videos online faster and easier.
Some artists such as 'Ok Go' found fame first through youtube with their clever video of themselves on four treadmills. Another band, Weezer exploited the fame youtube can bring by featuring many youtube celebrities in their video for the song 'pork and beans'
Because of the popularity of music videos on the internet MTV have started streaming music videos online itself.
