Music Video Research

MTV

Music Video History
The first music video shown on MTV was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles.
"Carouselambra" by Led Zepplin was played as the closing credits rolled on when MTV was first broadcast. HBO also had a 30 minute program of music video called 'Video Jukebox', which first aired around the time of MTV's launch and would last until late 1986. Also around this time, HBO would occasionally play one or a few music videos between films. In Chinese entertainment, music videos were simply known as 'MTV's' because the network was responsible for bringing music videos to popularity in that country.

The history and development into music videos
In 1984 Edward B.Marks, Joe Stern, George Thomas and various other performers projected a series of still images on a screen simultaneous to live performance to promote sales of their new song 'The Little Lost Child'. This would become a popular form of enetertainment known as the illistrated song, the first step towards the music video.
In 1926 with the arrival of 'Talkies' many musical and short films were produced. Vitaphone shorts (produced by Warner bros.) featured many bands, vocalists and artists. Spoony Melodies in 1930 was the first true musical series. Another early form of music video were one-song films called "promotional clips" made in the 1940's for the panoram visual jukebox. These were short films of musical selections, usually just a band on a movie set bandstand, made for playing. Thousands of 'Soundies' were made, mostly of Jazz musicans, but also of torch singers, comedians and dancers. Before the soundie, even dramatic movies typically had a musical interval, but the soundie put the music in the forefront. Musical films were another important precursor to music video, and several well known music videos have imitated the style of classic Hollywood musicals from the 1930s to the 1950s.

In the United Kingdom the long running TV show, Top of the Pops began playing music videos in the late 1970s, although the BBC placed strict limits on the number of 'outsourced' videos TOTP could use.