Task 1- History of the music video

Over thirty years ago, the television network MTV launched, marking the dawn of what many consider the music video’s heyday. But the genre itself has a much longer timeline that stretches as far back as the late 19th century. Here i'll explore some of the key moments in music video history that paved the way for MTV’s debut on August 1, 1981, when the pioneering channel fittingly and famously aired The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.”

The most influential music video of all time?

A thousand MySpace users were polled and asked to name the most influential music video of all time. MJ taking the #1 spot was a no-brainer, but some of the rest were surprising The full list of winners are below. 

1. Thriller - Michael Jackson
(John Landis broke through with The Blues Brothers movie in 1980, but it was the fact that he had just directed An American Werewolf in London that got him this gig. Amid thrillingly precise choreography, Jackson’s date becomes a night of the living dead. That venerable old ham Vincent Price delivered a voiceover and the rest was history.

Thriller was an event even when it was being shot in October 1983. Marlon Brando, Fred Astaire, Rock Hudson and Jackie Kennedy Onassis all turned up on set, and Eddie Murphy, Prince and Diana Ross were spotted at the private premiere on 14 November. Thirty years ago this week – on 21 November – it was first shown to the public. To be eligible for the Oscars, it needed a week-long theatrical release, so Landis arranged for it to open, bizarrely, for Disney's Fantasia at a single cinema in LA. And then, at midnight on 2 December, after weeks of trailers and hype, MTV showed it to the world.

Thriller sealed MTV's reputation as a new cultural force; dissolved racial barriers in the station's treatment of music (though MTV has always denied they existed); revolutionised music video production; spawned the "making of" genre of documentary ("The Making of Filler," as Landis said at the time); helped create a market for VHS rentals and sales, because fans were desperate to see it when they wanted, rather than at the will of TV stations; and, in 2009, became the first music video to be inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry.

"Music videos in the early 80s started as a little cottage industry in Britain, really," says Brian Grant, the British director who made the Private Dancer video for Tina Turner and Whitney Houston's I Wanna Dance With Somebody. "As soon as the Americans got involved, things became monetised, turning music videos into a proper industry, which operated alongside MTV. The big turning point was Thriller.")

2. Here It Goes Again - OK Go

(If there’s a definitive video of the YouTube age, this is arguably it. An ingenious routine involving eight treadmills, its zany, Chaplin-esque physical comedy was worldwide catnip and eminently “likeable” in social-media terms. To a greater or lesser extent, all the dancing memes you may or may not have “shared” since – including “Boombox 100” and those legion “Harlem Shake” clips – find their inspiration here. Throwing crazy shapes in public is nothing new, though. Spike Jonze did it for his video of Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” in 1998, and he must have seen Gillian Wearing’s “Dancing in Peckham” (1994). A case of pop imitating art?)

3. Baby One More Time - Britney Spears

4. Take On Me - A-Ha

5. Hurt - Johnny Cash 

6. Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen

7. Around the World - Daft Punk

8. Weapon of Choice - Fatboy Slim

9. Sledgehammer - Peter Gabriel

10. Sabotage - Beastie Boys

How have music videos changed over the years?

Music videos pre 1980s weren’t known as a big entity, only having small air time on shows like top of the pops when the band couldn’t appear. “Bohemian Rhapsody” by queen was arguably the first music video to be launched and it took a while for others to try this form of media. However this was to change in a big way when Robert W.Pittman came up with the idea to have a TV channel solely for music. MTV was launched in 1981, although only a few thousand people could watch it on the satellite television at the time. The first music video to be broadcasted on the channel was “Video Killed The Radio Star” by the Buggles which was seen as a statement of intent that music videos would take the world by storm.

In the early 80s MTV really took off when more of the population were watching cable television. Access for music videos was now easier than ever, and it was basically the norm for most artists to make a music video to accompany their singles. Both the film and music industry were starting to work together to form a hybrid product, by making music videos into trailers that would both promote the song and film.

1990: MTV reached 28 million viewers worldwide, so they started to broadcast music videos 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Critics were starting to review music videos and national music awards were starting to introduce “best music video” categories. MTV itself had annual MTV awards that would later become one of the biggest award ceremonies in the music industry.

During the 90s music video production would become more cinematic, and the budgets were bigger. Artists like Micheal Jackson and Madonna had some of the most expensive videos of that era making videos that would cost £5-7million to produce. MTV2 was later launched in 1996 to show more alternative music like Nirvana, to attract a wider audience. This was later to follow by many other sister channels like MTV Base, Hits and Dance. Other music channels like the Box, VHS, Kiss and many more making music television a bigger industry. As MTV was beginning to show less music videos and more reality TV, the rise on internet sites were on the horizon.

Bands now take time out of their schedules to shoot their videos and can take a few days to produce. Making music videos more like films than a small promotion of their songs. Millions are spent on production of music videos more than ever and videos are now viewed freely on many internet sites on many devices. Parodies of past music videos are now more frequent and more comedic videos are produced. Although serious narratives are still popular. Sexual content and crudeness is more widely accepted in music videos, however some videos still get banned. For example Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up” was banned on MTV for its drug content, and was seen to help Prodigy’s sales. In Europe German metal band Rammstein had the first recent ban for sexual content that was deemed to be pornographic. The song then reached number one in Germany and other European countries and became the most viewed banned video in recent times.