History of music videos

Music videos are used for promotional purposes and is a short film that shows the music and imagery. As time has progressed, music videos have been used as a marketing device and are used to help promote and sell records. Music videos became dominate in the 1980s due to MTV. Before this date, they were referred to as 'promo film' or illustrated song. 

Music videos have different styles, and some are just performance based, others have narrative, or literal meaning, or combine the two depending on the genre or song. 

The first music video was in 1894, sheet music publishers Edward B Marks and Joe Sterm hired an electrician George Thomas and various performers to promote the sales of their song 'The Little Lost Child'. Thomas projected a still images onto a screen in conjunction to live performances. This was the first step towards music video and known as the illustrated song. 

It was often seen that videos just contained a performance based content sometimes referring back to video footage of them playing live to make it feel like the audience are involved but as time has gone on, a narrative style has been brought in. However, performance videos do have a slight narrative to them anyway due to the lyrics in the song and they're touching on it, but narrative/performance videos allowed people to visually see the narrative being told and often meant people became more involved lyrically in the song. This is why other genres such as pop/indie benefit from this where as rock tend to stick to performance. This is because they're vocal point is on the music rather than the lyrics. 

MTV

'Music Television' launched on the 1st August, 1981. The purpose was to play music videos guided by hosts. Today, the channel is used for a variety of reality TV shows and scripted television programs targeted at adolescents and young adults.

The first music video that was shown on MTV was 'The Bugles - Video Killed The Radio Star' and the second one was Pat Benatar's - You Better Run. The screen would go black when an employee at MTV would insert a tape. MTV obviously had a big immediate effect in the areas where the music video channel could be picked up. This lead to the advance that in areas where MTV was available, record stores were selling music that local radio stations where not showing.

The original purpose of MTV was to be 'Music Television' and to play music videos 24 hours a day, 7 days. The original tag lines portrayed and highlighted what they aimed to do, change music as they were "you'll never look at music in the same way again". Currently, MTV doesn't play 24/7, however, it has various smaller channels such as MTV hits and MTV Jams.

In 1984, MTV began a top 40 station, and people where hired to host the channel and introduce the songs being played, these were called 'video jockeys. These often became celebrities, the original five in 1981 were Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, J.J Jackson and Martha Quinn.

The 'Video Jockeys' would 'intro' and 'outro' segments to music videos, and include music news, interviews, concert dates and promotions. This helped increased the popularity of the music industry all together. It appeared 'live' though they were pre-taped within a regular week.

During the early days of the channel, stars took over within an hour as 'guests VJs'. These included people such as Billy Idol, Phil Collins, Simon LeBon and Prince. The very first non-white act played on MTV in the U.S was UK band The Specials.  However, MTV rejected other black artists' videos such as Rick James - Super Freak because they didn't fit into the chosen format at the time. Although, this outraged him and vocally battled for the inclusion of black artists videos on the channel. David Bowie questions MTV's lack of black artists during an on-air interview with Mark Goodman in 1983.

In the present day, MTV is more based on reality TV shows such as Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, The Hills, My Super Sweet Sixteen, Jersey Shore and Geordie Shore. People have argued that they should play more music videos, however the president of MTV, Christina Norman argued back that there are plenty of other opportunities to watch music videos on the web and other smaller MTV channels so they are still offering this.